Herbert Reed, seen with his medicines, believes
depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life.
He's a leading figure in a fight against the Pentagon.
Posted on 08/13/2006 6:36:02 AM PDT by yankeedame
Is an Armament Sickening U.S. Soldiers?
By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP
Herbert Reed, seen with his medicines, believes
depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life.
He's a leading figure in a fight against the Pentagon.
NEW YORK (Aug. 12) - It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills - morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.
Ammunition coated with depleted uranium leaves behind
a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium.
About 30 percent of the 700,000 soldiers who served in the first Gulf War still suffer illnesses similar to Reed's. Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor.
Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.
Depleted uranium is also used as a protective shell on
tanks. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of
the material sitting in hazardous waste storage sites
There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.
In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.
"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it - thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.
Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth
defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion,
when bombs with depleted uranium were used there.
A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
It took the Pentagon 25 years to acknowledge that
Agent Orange -- a corrosive defoliant used to melt the
jungles of Vietnam -- was linked to severe illnesses.
Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.
Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously healthy life.
The U.S. tested an atomic bomb in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Forty years later, the military compensated sick World War II vets exposed to radioactive blasts.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.
"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said, 'It's all in your head.'"
Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn't.
Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.
"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching depleted uranium."
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.
The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.
The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.
Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA....
======================
--YankeeDame: This is a long article. It goes on for two more full-length pages. The finial lines of which are
=========================
...No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.
Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.
He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.
"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a professional athlete.
"Then we come back and we're all sick."
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.
And that about says it all, folks.
He's got an awfully full head of hair for someone who claims to have been exposed to a lot of radiation.
Chemical and biological weapons used by Iraq may have contributed to this man's illness, but depleted uranium is not a signifcant risk to health. We use depleted uranium for armor in the latest M1 tanks and Bradleys. The AP strikes out here as usual. The writer needs to start over again and do research into low levels of chemical and biological weapons used by Saddam on our troops.
I'm not following you here. Are you dismissing out of hand their claims of illness simply because they've brought suit against the Army?
It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium.
!!! JEEPERS !!!
This shows that the person who wrote this doesn't have a clue about DU. They sure seem to have an agenda, though.
Not having a clue about what they write about never stopped a journalist before, why should it now? Journalists aren't really that bright, in general.
The motivation is purely money (greed) not a return to good health.
The AP strikes out here as usual. The writer needs to start over again and do research into low levels of chemical and biological weapons used by Saddam on our troops.
Let's all recognize this article for what it is: An attempt to harm and disgrace the U.S. military.
This thread is way too serious to say it.
Nope.
Have a good friend with Gulf War Syndrome. He woke up in a hospital in Germany, 5 days after lights out in Iraq. After he could walk, he was retired medically, but that was by no means the end of his troubles. He figures he was gassed by the Iraqis
crikee! I have some at the house!
hehehe...went through my head, too. :-)
Based on everything I've read on this subject, I believe Saddam used low levels of chemical and biological weapons on our soldiers in Gulf War I. That's why we hit the Republican Guard so hard during the middle of the ground war and that's why we bombed the entire convoy of Iraqi vehicles fleeing Kuwait (ending in the famous "Highway of Death"). According to a FReeper named The Dentist, we even dropped a fuel-air explosive on the Iraqis, which makes the biggest explosion possible without using a nuclear weapon. Bush 41 might have even nuked Iraq if the war had lasted longer, but I think by the time we figured out conclusively what chemicals Saddam had used on us, the war was already over and the chem/bio threat was gone.
just exactly what part of DEPLETED don't they understand???
Civilian applications for depleted uranium are fairly limited and are typically unrelated to its radioactive properties. It primarily finds application as ballast because of its high density. Such applications include sailboat keels, as counterweights and sinker bars in oil drills, gyroscope rotors, and in other places where there is a need to place a weight that occupies as little space as possible. Other relatively minor consumer product uses have included: incorporation into dental porcelain used for false teeth to simulate the fluorescence of natural teeth; and in uranium-bearing reagents used in chemistry laboratories.
Uranium was widely used as a coloring matter for porcelain and glass in the 19th century. The practice was believed to be a matter of history, however in 1999 concentrations of 10% depleted uranium were found in "jaune no.17" a yellow enamel powder that was being produced in France by Cristallerie de Saint-Paul, a manufacturer of enamel pigments. The depleted uranium used in the powder was sold by Cogéma's Pierrelatte facility. Cogema has since confirmed that it has made a decision to stop the sale of depleted uranium to producers of enamel and glass. [5]
DU is also used for shielding for radiation sources used in medical and industrial radiography.
I have a friend who also has GWS, he is currently in Afghanistan.
He thinks it may have been the toxic air from the burning oilfields
Meaning that greater than 99% of its radioactive potential has already expired, and for the ~1% that could split, any given atom has a 50% chance of splitting sometime in the next 4.5 billion years (or another way to think of this is that 50% of the ~1% left will split sometime in the next 4.5 billion years. In other words, a whole lotta nothin' has happened in the last ten years. Or another way of saying this is that it not siginficantly more radioactive than the dirt in your front lawn.
DemocraticUnderground dust??
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