Gulf War veteran struggles with pain, illness - and government denials

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/local_n...761382,00.html

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Excellent article from Memphis, TN. paper. There are lots of pictures at the site also. Just shows how poorly our veterans continue to be treated. Every war gets worse it seems. I pity the poor bastards from this one !

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EXPOSED TO WAR
Gulf War veteran struggles with pain, illness - and government denials

February 23, 2003

EXPOSED TO WAR



"It was like, 'Hello, welcome to war.' "

Troas Cleveland had just arrived in Saudi Arabia as an Army Reservist, part of the support team for Operation Desert Storm. The arrival almost seemed like a cruel initiation joke, except that it was real. She described it in a letter to her Memphis boyfriend: "Feb. 8, 1991. The moment we arrived in Saudi Arabia was chaos. A patriot shot down a scud right over our heads."

Debris rained down on her and the rest of the newly arrived Reservists. One, an orthopedic surgeon from Florida, ran back onto their bus to try to find his golf clubs. "I guess he was trying to protect them," says Cleveland, who was just glad to be alive. She said so in the rest of that letter: "When I get home I'm going to do be a different person. Before, I took life for granted. Now being so close to death I wanna live life to the fullest," she wrote.

Cleveland survived, but life for her is not what she envisioned. Health problems that she believes are associated with what happened to her during Desert Storm have left her in pain and bordering on disillusionment, and engaged in a battle for help with her own government.

Cleveland (her first name, Troas, is pronounced like Joyce) was 21 when was drawn to the Army Reserve out of patriotism. An older sister had served five years in the regular Army. Cleveland trained as a pharmacy technician and studied battlefield first aid. Suddenly, she was worried by the immediacy of the situation.

This was a desert, but it was cold, even during the day. There were no trees or buildings to block the harsh wind, and it blew fine sand, which chafed her skin. In the back of her mind, she worried about being kidnapped or taken prisoner by Iraqi soldiers. There were stories about a $1,000 bounty on American women in Iraq. She also feared being "burned alive." And there were scorpions darting about in the sand, snakes, swarms of insects and the possibility of malaria.

Most of those worries now seem trivial to her. Twelve years since Desert Storm, Cleveland, 33, is proud to have endured one of the harshest six months of her life. She "served a useful purpose," and she survived. "I served a piece of history. I don't regret going, and I believe in the war we're about to have. If I wasn't sick and they needed me tomorrow, I would go. I think the world would be safer if Saddam didn't exist in it."

It's that part about being sick that now worries her. Like many other Desert Shield and Desert Storm veterans, Cleveland came home feeling worse for wear, but eager to marry, have a family and get on with her life.

One of her letters to boyfriend Anthony Cleveland, a dispatcher for the Memphis Police Department, seemed to foreshadow something worse than scorpions in the sand, sand in her food and sand blowing in her face.

"Feb. 18, 1991. When I get back, I hope that I haven't changed any. You know like shell-shocked. I am scared of the after-effects of this war!! I hope to come back the way I left."

She didn't.

Troas returned to Memphis in June 1991, and she and Anthony began planning their wedding. It


took one year. She was a June bride, 1992. Her mother-in-law, Yvonne Cleveland-Holmes, an administrative assistant in the Memphis Department of Public Works, says she began to worry "either just before or just after the wedding. Her hair started coming out. Then she started having thyroid problems. She started picking up weight. It was a drastic change in a year's time. She wasn't a big eater."

In the 11 years since, Cleveland's list of ailments has grown into the familiar litany that more than 160,000 Desert Shield and Desert Storm veterans call "Gulf War Syndrome."

Memphis Veteran's Medical Center serves roughly 200,000 veterans in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. Of those, a computer search shows 5,138 Gulf War veterans have applied for care, and 735 of them (about 14 percent) completed an examination as part of a national study looking for links to a wide range of illnesses that may be related to the gulf war.

Results of that study were not available. For Cleveland, who took part in the study, the list of illnesses seems to grow each year. Her Memphis doctors declined to comment.

"I feel like I'm sitting on a time bomb," she says.

Since her return from the Middle East, the Board of Veterans' Appeals in Washington has repeatedly denied all but one of more than a dozen claims she has filed for injuries, illnesses and other maladies, which she believes are directly related to her six months in the Middle East.

For her, the list seems more than any 33-year-old woman possibly could have encountered without her "exposures" as a soldier - back injury, arthritis, cataract, thinning hair (she now wears a wig), asthma, chronic sinusitis, fatigue, headaches, wrist injury, three benign tumors, rashes. She also filed and was denied a separate claim for her son, now 8, delivered by cesarean section with a heart condition, eczema and other problems.

One study by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Johns Hopkins University suggests children of Gulf War veterans are two to three times as likely as those of other veterans to have birth defects. Pentagon epidemiologists say other studies show no service-related connection.

Troas and her mother-in-law had talked about Desert Storm when her first symptoms appeared. Like a mother, Cleveland-Holmes says she worried even more as the details began to spill out. "She was outdoors most of the time, so she was probably exposed to a lot of stuff. There was so much talk about chemical warfare."

Horror close up

Cleveland's letters to Anthony are now stored in the attic of their Shelby County home, a two-story house financed through the Department of Veterans Affairs and home to the rest of her keepsakes from her stint in the military. Writing the letters 12 years ago was a chance to relax at the end of a long day and send her love. She often wrote them at night by the light of a kerosene lamp in her tent.

The memory of that triggers other memories about what she was exposed to in Saudi Arabia and, eventually, Kuwait when Iraqi soldiers were driven out after ransacking Kuwait City and setting Kuwait's oil fields ablaze.

She thought she was prepared before she ever left the United States. During training at Fort Bragg, N.C., she had been given shots to protect against anthrax. Her smallpox vaccination was up to date, and she had been given pills - something called pyridostigmine bromide or PB - as a precaution against the deadly nerve agent soman.

Like many others, Cleveland hadn't wanted to take the anthrax shots. "I wouldn't take it at first, but my company commander came and physically made us get into a cab. He said, 'You have to go get the shot, or you can get an Article 15.' That's like a reprimand with $150 deducted from your check. I was only making something like $550 a month. Literally, we did not have a choice."

Once in the desert, Cleveland says her unit was close enough to the fighting that explosions rattled the tents at night. During the day, heavy winds made it difficult to set up camp. Once, while holding a tent pole and bracing against wind gusts, Cleveland says her wrists were bent "almost backwards."

The same winds blew sand hard enough "to scratch the corneas of your eyes. There was sand in our clothes, sand in our food, sand in our beds. We breathed sand."

Water came to camp in trucks once used to haul fuel. "I'm almost certain it was diesel fuel because that's what all the vehicles ran off of. When you took a shower in that water, it left your skin looking sort of ashy white. They told us not to drink it."

The soldiers took care of the wounded and tried to divert themselves by writing letters.

Cleveland wrote on March 15, 1991: "I am in Kuwait City. I saw some amazing things on the way up here. The roads are busted up very bad. There are over 600 cars and 300 military vehicles burned up, blown over or exploded all over the road. The Iraqi soldiers really busted this town up. It's almost unbelievable how bad this country is destroyed. Buildings are shattered and falling down. Once we entered Kuwait, the sky became dark and gray you know like in the movies or something. It was scary to go from light to complete darkness. The reason it is like that is because Saddam set 500 oil fields on fire and they give off smoke, which makes the sky black. The smoke is very thick and black. The oil fields have been burning since the beginning of the war . . . At night the sky is orange-red. You can see them flaming in the sky like torches."

For Cleveland, those fires sparked her own fear of being burned alive, but they also ignited her patriotism. Two days after entering Kuwait City, she wrote: "March 17, 1991. They told us that there are a lot of hurt people that need us. I really hate to go but I hate for those people to suffer. I saw some pictures of Kuwait, and there were burned bodies and dead Iraqi soldiers lying on the roadside. Anthony, I never imagined to say this, but I love America. The country isn't perfect, but believe me our country is a lot better than these countries I've been in."

Cleveland was breathing the black soot-filled air as she wrote. "When you would blow your nose it would be black, and the mucous in the corners of your eyes would be black," she says.

Talking about it reminds her of other hazards on the desert. "There were swarms of flies. It's like they were attacking us - in your hair and everywhere. There were all kinds of bugs I couldn't even identify." The Army issued Reservists aerosol spray cans of insecticide. "I don't know what was in it, but it came in little green spray cans," says Cleveland.


Some Gulf War veterans have said they would have preferred to step on a land mine rather than go through the mounting health problems they have encountered, from severe arthritis to Lou Gehrig's disease to dementia.

'There is a problem'

Health concerns for some veterans have been made more difficult by repeated denials from the Department of Veterans Affairs that there is such an ailment as "Gulf War Syndrome." Only recently has the VA begun to admit that service in Desert Shield and Desert Storm brought exposures with potentially lethal results, says Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md.

Robinson, a former Army Ranger sergeant who served in Desert Storm, says the pattern of denials is typical. It took more than 20 years before the military admitted health problems related to the Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam, he says. "Two years ago, veterans who stood out on the desert and watched the first atomic blast received benefits as a result of exposure to radiation. Gulf War veterans have waited 12 years until someone started looking at actual exposures rather than arguing that it was psychological."

Now, Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman Phil Budahn says the reported symptoms of most claims "don't fall into a cluster that we can recognize, but it is clear to the VA that there is a problem."

That did not help Troas Cleveland when she opened a thick letter last week from the Board of Veterans' Appeals, hoping that it had finally recognized her health problems as part of a recognizable set of illnesses among Gulf War vets.

Instead, the board denied each claim. Her illnesses had names - like arthritis, sinusitis, alopecia areata (hair loss) - so they were not "undiagnosable" problems that could be attributed to possible exposures during the Gulf War, the board said, as if scripting a new version of Catch-22.

The only malady for which the VA has agreed to offer any compensation is Cleveland's wrist injury, awarding her 10 percent of the maximum disability. That means $106 a month of a potential compensation of more than $1,000 a month.

"It really looks like the VA is sleeping on some of the issues people are bringing to them. They're more or less looking the other way," said Anthony. Every day when he arrives home from work, he picks his wife up to stretch her back, helping relieve lower back pains that are part of her arthritic condition.

"I've seen her crawl across the floor because she couldn't walk. She'd wake up in the morning and try to get out of bed and fall onto her hands and knees to try to avoid the pain."

Troas graduated from nursing school after serving in the Reserves. She worked at Methodist Healthcare-South, several agencies and nursing homes, then Baptist Memorial Hospital-Germantown before her arthritis made it too difficult to work, she says.

Now her patriotism is being tested. "It's my gut feeling that they know what happened, but they don't want to come out and say. I feel like it's for fear of all the claims they're going to get.

"They want us to serve our country, to protect our nation in time of war, but they don't want to take care of the veteran. I think the government knows that as long as people are being born, veterans are dispensable. They'll put on a good face when we die. The President may even show up. But they don't care."


- Michael Lollar: 529-2793

[catman]

Good post Larry, thanks.

Trav

[leroy8541]

I feel for her. I tried to use the Memphis VA what a rat hole!! I have never been treated like a second rate citizen until I went there, when I left I felt abused. Therefore have never returned. Now I am so Arthritic I can hardly walk. If having to go there for help is the only option, I would rather eat a bullet!!

[MORTARDUDE]

What part of Arkansas are you from ? I have had some bad experiences with the Memphis VA in the past. I have had several friends who say it has changed a lot. I have been to the Vet Center several times in the past six months about my claim, and have nothing but praise for them. Wishing you all the best.

Larry

[CDaffron]

I to am a Desert Storm veteran, my prayers will be with the young woman vet. Since I returned from the Gulf I have had to have 8 operations. I have had 2 brain surgeries for chronic headaches which started after my service in the Gulf War. I have a developed a thyriod condition. I've had 3 knee surgeries and sinus reconstruction. My right elbow and hand have been operated on. I have had numerous nuerological problems as well as intestinal trouble. I go to the VA hospital in Jackson,Ms. I to have been denied compensation for my illnesses from the Gulf War. This country does not care how they treat it's veterans or servicemen and women at all. As long as they get the service they need is all theat matters to them.

[deltamedic]

My sympathy to these, my fellow vets in arms; now you are in the same mess that we as Vietnam Vets were in. We had to fight long and hard, tooth and nail to finally get health care from the VA and to get Agent Orange recognized as chemical exposure and in some arenas we're still fighting for healthcare as well as claims.
I hope it doesn't take as long to get help for you as it did for us but with all the cutbacks and feet dragging its gonna be a battle. The main thing is don't let the VA get you discouraged to the point that you quit going to the facility or pushing your claim! This is a favorite tactic of theirs.
Hang in there, kepp riding their butts and keep the pressure on your Congressmen, and Senators.

Doc

[blues clues]

The government is cutting back on the VA, while they are making more disabled vet. I read somewhere that about 19 million has been cut or will be cut to make sure Bush get's his tax cut, the way I see it thats a crime aganist the vet's that they say they love and hold up on high.l
razz

[1sgboom]

Brothers, what really bothers me, is that Bush has asked for $74.4 Billion for this war effort ,clean up, and humanitarin efforts, But we disabled veterans are made to suffer! Make the Iraqis pay for all that with the oil they produce, and give the disabled vets what they earned, and need....proper medical care, and compensation! Think about this, after G.W.II, how many more disabled brothers & sisters will there be? Worse yet,how will they be treated by a grateful nation!

"SAPPERS BREECH HELL!"

[1sgboom]

Been fighting the V.A. for 9 years now!

"SAPPERS BREECH HELL!"

[MORTARDUDE]

the VA stone-walled the Vietnam Vets for years on Agent Orange.
We left for the most part en-masse by 1973 and it was 1982 before they did the exams. The Gulf War was over in 1991 and they still are screwing Gulf War vets over their diseases. They have to accept some blame in all of this. It all sucks.....

Larry