Larry Kay will never forget the night of the white cloud. On Jan. 20, 1991, three days after the Gulf War had started, Kay was dozing in an armchair at his construction battalion’s camp in Saudi Arabia, more than 100 miles from the Kuwaiti border. At 3 a.m. an exploding Scud missile jolted him awake. Before Kay had time to clamp on his gas mask, the acrid smell of ammonia assaulted his lungs, and he watched a whitish gray cloud drift over the camp. Says he: “Right after that, people started getting sick.”
Members of the battalion developed large red blotches on their hands and arms. Within a week, Kay felt tired almost all the time. Since then he has suffered chronic diarrhea, aches in all his joints and has difficulty breathing — symptoms that have bedeviled many of the Seabees who served with Kay in the Persian Gulf. “These guys have been miserable for the past two years, and they weren’t having any of these problems before that,” says Charles Jackson, a physician at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tuskegee, Alabama. Last month, after running many tests on Kay and researching medical journals going as far back as World War I, Jackson determined that the soldier had been exposed to chemical agents. He was the first Gulf War vet to receive that diagnosis, despite similar complaints from thousands of ailing troops.
The Veterans Affairs Department has since downplayed Jackson’s diagnosis. But Kay, a 52-year-old fireman from Columbus, Georgia, who served on reserve duty, is not getting well. In fact, he is more convinced than ever that he must have been exposed to disease-causing chemical agents while serving in the gulf. Several veterans and their families testified before a congressional committee last week that the Defense Department has either ignored their complaints or dismissed the troops who make them as malingerers.
Such congressional scrutiny has prompted the Pentagon to look more strenuously into the mystery of what is generally described as Gulf War syndrome. So far, 8,000 veterans of the war have registered their symptoms with the U.S. government. The veterans’ campaign for greater official recognition of the malady was bolstered last week when the Pentagon reversed itself and accepted a report from the Czech military indicating that some of its chemical sensors detected trace amounts of mustard gas and the nerve poison sarin in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. A team of U.S. experts determined that the Czech evidence was both reliable and convincing. The experts could not explain, however, where the toxins came from. “There were no Scud launches, no artillery exchanges, or no offensive actions at this time that could have delivered the chemical agents,” Defense Secretary Les Aspin said last week.
The Czechs believe the toxins drifted over ground troops after allied forces blew up an Iraqi chemical installation 100 miles northwest of Kuwait. U.S. defense officials have rejected that idea because they believe the wind was blowing in the opposite direction — back into Iraq. Furthermore, they found no evidence of casualties caused by chemical agents anywhere near the site of the attack.
Even if the Czech equipment did pick up traces of chemical agents, that still doesn’t explain why so many other soldiers who were stationed far from the Czech position became ill. Medical experts have considered several possibilities — everything from allergic reactions to harmful exposure to microwave radiation. Unfortunately, investigators say, none of these possible solutions fit all the facts.
The latest guess focuses on heavy industrial pollution around the Saudi city of Jubail, where many of the ailing troops were deployed. “I think we are dealing with, in some groups, a specific exposure to some kind of industrial chemical,” said Major General Ronald Blanck, commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. That exposure may, in turn, have sensitized soldiers to the degree that their bodies can no longer tolerate minute, normally harmless amounts of environmental toxins.
This syndrome, called “multiple chemical sensitivity,” explains some of the respiratory symptoms doctors have documented. But it cannot account for all the ailments. As a result, Aspin announced the creation of a board of inquiry headed by Joshua Lederberg of Rockefeller University, a Nobel- prizewinning expert on rare and emerging diseases. But it is up to the Pentagon to bridge the credibility gap that seems to have sprouted over the strange new syndrome.
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