Vet groups asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to step in and do an independent study. It's not only GIs in the field at risk, they say, having learned the lessons of Vietnam and Gulf War I, but those who might come down with related mystery ailments in the future. Data gathered on the battlefield can go a long way toward proving cause and effect. The military has begun doing some of that. Since 1998, it has been developing its Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Readiness System, or DOEHRS, a software program to record chemical and biological exposures; the data can help commanders determine the risks in battle and help medical professionals determine future health risks. But full use of the system is years away.
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, wonders if Gulf War II illness is not inevitable. "We have improved the way we monitor our soldiers before and after deployment," he says. "But we still don't test treatments against biological or chemical agents in human subjects, relying instead on interpreting results from animals for humans." There are obviously ethical conflicts in testing dangerous agents on human subjects, but that, in effect, is what the military is doing with its soldiers. Yet if we're not doing it in a controlled setting with volunteers, using great new medical technology, Caplan asks, how can we justify battlefield experiments? "In a world threatened by weapons of mass destruction, using hundreds of thousands of troops and civilians as guinea pigs makes little sense," he says.
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About the Author
Seattle Weekly writer Rick Anderson started his newspaper career as a copy boy for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. From there, he went to the Skagit Valley Herald, the Daily Olympian, the Hayward, Calif., Daily Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Tri-City Herald, the P-I again, The Seattle Times, then Seattle Weekly. And he's still broke.
This article is drawn from Home Front: The Government's War on Soldiers (Clarity Press, 2004), a book that grew out of a story Anderson wrote for SW—"Crippled Home Front" (April 9, 2003). That article drew wide response and is displayed at numerous Web sites, including that of Arlington National Cemetery.
Anderson will read from and sign Home Front on July 30 at 6 p.m. at Third Place Books in Bothell; Aug. 10, 7:30 p.m., at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle; Aug. 26, 7 p.m., at University Book Store in Seattle; and Aug. 27, 7:30 p.m., at Village Bookstore in Bellingham.
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It's not that soldiers aren't aware of some of the medical, biological, and environmental threats of war, which the military downplays. Gulf War veterans who served overseas were three times as likely to get sick as troops who stayed home.
Trouble is, what was it over there that caused it? Between their patriotic service and their personal futures there lingers a nagging fear of the unknown—or, in the Pentagon's view, the unproved. The doubts dog them as they stand in line for their shots or march though a microscopic particle cloud across the desert. What did they just step in? Breathe? Touch? Why did they develop that rash? That fear is one of the reasons some servicemen rushed off to freeze their sperm before heading to Iraq in 2003. They feared the weapons of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush.
Two weeks ago, after briefly halting its anthrax vaccine program due to a legal challenge and then reconsidering how it should be deployed, the Pentagon opted to expand anthrax and smallpox vaccine use, requiring shots for all U.S. troops under the Central Command (from North Africa to Pakistan). Vaccinations also will be mandatory for civilian employees and defense-contract workers. The Pentagon called anthrax and smallpox two of the top biological warfare threats, although more soldiers have died from the vaccines than from these weapons of mass destruction. The order also renews mandatory shots for military personnel headed to South Korea. That's where Army cook Sandra Larson of Spokane was going when she was given the vaccine that led to her death.
randerson@seattleweekly.com
This article is an excerpt from Home Front: The Government's War on Soldiers (Clarity Press, 2004).
