Ailing Veterans seek answers!

[Gimpy]

Ailing veterans seek answers to government's mysterious ways
Sunday, August 17, 2003
Joyce Riley was on the phone from Missouri the other day, talking in that voice the harried and the passionate use because they have little choice.
Said she couldn't be much help, and with good reason.
"The DoD [Department of Defense] doesn't want to give us any info," she said. "We know of at least 100 illnesses, maybe as many as 55 being treated at one time, and it's not pneumonia."
I'd contacted her hoping to find a local soldier who'd been sent home ill of the same phenomenon, but the American Gulf War Veterans Association, for which she works, apparently doesn't have the budget for an applicable database, and the Department of Defense isn't helping.
In this era of gunslinging pre-emptive foreign policy, when are they going to rename it the Department of Offense, anyway?
For the moment, the phrase "not pneumonia" is the heartsick impetus of American families who are losing young servicemen and -women in Iraq to a mysterious illness the Department of Defense has been unable to manage, except to change its official designation from "mystery illness" to "pneumonia."
The mystery put 20-year-old Josh Neusche in the ground last month, a couple of days after he died while being transferred between German hospitals for dialysis. Official military diagnosis: pneumonia.
His parents, who visited the German hospital where he'd been taken from Iraq, didn't think so.
"When we had to wear rubber gloves and suit up just to touch Josh or be in the same room with him, we knew something wasn't right. That is not pneumonia," Mark Neusche told Marsha Paxson of the Lake Sun (Mo.) Leader. "If it took our boy in a matter of days, how many other young soldiers are going to die, or already have and we don't know about it?"
Josh's mother reported seeing "30 to 40" other Americans brought into the hospital at Landstuhl at the same time.
Officially, two have died and 17 others have been hospitalized for "pneumonia" since April. Two more were hospitalized this week. It's only the beginning.
According to the American Gulf War Veterans Association, about half the nearly 700,000 veterans of the first Gulf War are now ill and more than 200,000 of them have filed for disability but have received no adequate diagnosis or treatment. "Mystery illness" was first a designation for those service people, who are pretty much left to fend for themselves.
With the huge deployment of Gulf War II and no end to the fighting in sight, despite the theatrical proclamations of George W. Bush, the man some vets derisively refer to as "the flight suit in chief," a disturbing percentage of the Americans who survive the Iraqi occupation will be too sick to have a chance at a normal existence back home.
Last Wednesday, Vanessa Turner went on CNN to complain about her treatment at a Massachusetts veterans hospital. Sickened in Iraq by symptoms similar to "pneumonia," a hospital spokesman told her she'd missed a deadline to apply for treatment and would have to wait a month.
"I asked, what I was supposed to do for a month?" said Turner, now officially U.S. Army (ret.) due to illness. "They said I should go to the emergency room every day. That's when I left."
Massachusetts Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy took up her cause, and the ensuing swirl merely highlighted what veterans from Vietnam forward have come to know. You can't count on the government for much beyond putting you in jeopardy for no good reason.
"We cannot tolerate another whitewashing of a tragedy against our veterans," Riley said. "It has happened too many times before with our failure to safeguard our troops, adequately diagnose and effectively treat the victims of Agent Orange spraying, Project Shad shipboard experimentation and Gulf War Illness I. This time someone has to be held accountable."
And, of course, no one will be.
In our current totalitarian state, you can't even find out what gets said when the vice president meets with his industry buddies to formulate energy policy.
For the poor and the powerless, who do most of this administration's dirtiest work, well, they get to sit in a stinking biohazard bunker waiting for a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq and watch Bush on TV saying, "Bring it on!" I wonder how many of them know how he hid from Vietnam in the Texas National Guard.
It's enough to make you sick.
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Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
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