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....
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--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.
Im no expert either, but isuspect that metal toxicity is the only real issue with DU
I bet he's fun at a party.
Read no further. They do not know what they are writing about.
Hint, the shells are not coated with DU, they have DU cores, often covered by an aerodynamic shell of something very light, like aluminum.
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.Morphine AND Methadone??? An Antidepressant AND Valium??? Then a Muscle Relaxant And Viagra?
Uh... something is wrong with that picture. There's certain drugs you DON'T take together (I know). Me thinks this 'story' is BS.
If true, the only part that makes sense is the Valium. (and if he didn't take the 'Muscle Relaxant' I doubt he'd need the Viagra)
No,no,no...sorry if I gave that impression.
When I read the line about them getting lawyers to sue the Army the word that jumped out at me was lawyers. Who, as we all know, are masters at setting the stage before they go in for the $$$ kill. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if this article was a plant (one of many) and the writer a stooge (ditto) for the lawyers on this.
morphine AND methadone? Gee whiz, I didn't think they prescribed methadone to anyone unless they were opiate addicts in the first place. Since these 2 also cause constipation, I suppose the stool-softener is a must.
It sounds like much of his illness is probably caused by the drugs he is taking.
I share your disdain and distrust of lawyers.
However, I recall the decades battle waged by those Vietnam veterans that were poisoned by Agent Orange.
A method they used, and is used by a lot of people trying to get information out of a stonewalling government or other entity, is to file suit.
Filing suit forces the other party into disclosure.
That may be what these guys are doing.
A lot of people immediately pooh-pooh the prospect of someone getting sick from DU. But, we're all different. Some of us get sick from peanuts. Some from seafood. Etc.
Out of a military force of hundreds of thousands that have served time in the Gulf, there's bound to be some that get sick from things other don't.
I don't know enough about DU one way or another to dismiss it out of hand.
"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."
So he's taking:
Morphine
Methadone
Valium
musle relaxers
AND an antidepressant
And he wonders why he suffers from "sexual disfunction"?
That's a drug cocktail that would put The King in a grave.
"Gee whiz, I didn't think they prescribed methadone to anyone unless they were opiate addicts in the first place."
Methadone is commonly used for pain. I was on it for about 2 years for pain caused by herniated discs.
There is no "high" to it.
I've been saying that for years......
That could depend on how many milligrams a person is on. It may not be a high like heroin/dilaudid/morphine, etc., but it is a high.
But I sure didn't know the prescribed it for pain in the US. Seems like over-kill to give the guy methadone AND morphine.
It was bad
Saddam polluted half the planet with that stunt.
The troops were at gound zero
Which Iraqi government would that be? The one we destroyed or the one we put in place?
The Iraqi goverment that pays the bills, if our men were sickened by the goverment of the Iraqi people then that goverment should compensate those affected. They have oil, they are not the poor kid on the block we helped in their need and they shouldn't get a free ride.
I would guess these problems are the result of exposure to low levels of nerve agents that were released either intentionally by the Iraqi forces or unintentionally by the bombing of the Iraqi munitions storage facilities as a part of the war, rather than dust from the Deplete Uranium shells.
I think it's pretty obvious that there were chemical weapons in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion, and some of the stuff got released.
I can not imagine why a tanker would need such a device.
To explain why his ***** are glowing?
Don't know, the Army said it.
is comparing radioactivity of DU to that of "natural uranium metal"...
Ah, missed the metal part. However, I knew about the heavy metal poisoning. My one successful paper that I wrote in High School Chemistry was on heavy metal poisoning. I still have it because it was the only one that passed. (My trophy case is real small)
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