Gulf Veterans’ Mystery Illness Probed by U.S.

At the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in downtown Birmingham, researchers are hunting desperately for clues to Willie Hicks’ skin rash, Walter Davis’ paralysis and the unexplained breathing problems that have Sears McQueen, at only 38, walking with a cane.

Here, a specialized group of medical experts is treating the largest concentration of sick veterans from the United States’ last war, ex-soldiers complaining of ailments ranging from memory loss to cancerous tumors, with some of the symptoms spreading to their spouses and children.

The Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs, both under attack by desperate Persian Gulf War veterans, hope that additional experiments will yield a diagnosis that so far has perplexed and evaded experts.

Was it the oil wells set ablaze by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein? Was it a parasitic sand fly or the heavy use of diesel fuel in the dry desert region? Was it contamination from ammonia and fertilizer plants, like the Pentagon has suggested, or fallout from chemical or biological warfare?

“This is a real mystery,” Dr. Charles Jackson, a VA physician working with Alabama veterans, said in an interview last week. “One of the great mysteries of the century. And I don’t exaggerate.”

Susan Ritter, who coordinates the Persian Gulf Family Support Program in Birmingham, is equally confounded. “I feel like something happened over there that made these people sick, and unless we can find out what did happen over there, we may never know how to treat them,” she said.

The Pentagon has insisted that no chemical contamination was found by U.S. detectors during the Gulf War and that some low levels of contamination reported recently by the Czech government did not affect U.S. troops.

Nevertheless, Jackson recently has given several patients tentative diagnoses of “chemical-biological warfare exposure”--a development that has heightened some veterans’ hopes that an answer to their illnesses may be forthcoming.

In recent months, small groups of veterans have begun meeting around the city, discussing their problems, trading scraps of information they hear from doctors, loaning money to each other to keep their families going.

They gathered the other night at Hicks’ home. He is 49, with a wife and five children, and they are living in government-subsidized housing now that his heat flashes, memory loss and skin rashes have cost him his job at a local auto parts store.

Hicks’ arms are covered with red sores, many bleeding. During the meeting, he pulled out a diary he kept during the war and flipped back to the entries for January, 1991.

Jan. 17: “U.S. attacked Iraq at 12:40 a.m. . . . Went to MOPP 4 (chemical attack protective gear). . . . Then we took nerve gas pills.”

Jan. 18: “Took Mylanta for stomach. . . . I’m hot as hell. . . . Bad night. No rest. Taking nerve pills.”

Jan. 20: “Iraq fired missiles. . . . No place to sleep. Had to sleep on truck after driving all night.”

Others in the room, members of Alabama National Guard and Reserve units sent to Kuwait to build camps and maintain hospital units, recalled the screech and crash of Scud missiles in the night and described their conditions today.

McQueen lost his job at a local cast-iron plant. His pockets are full of pill bottles. He sleeps all day, and when he awakens he often experiences ugly mood swings.

“I’ve got holes in my lungs,” he said, pointing to a stack of medical evaluations that attest to his breathing difficulties.

“I can’t draw my breath. My children sit up on their momma’s lap and say: ‘Momma, we’re scared of Daddy.’ ”

Next to him on the divan is Davis, 41, once a bodybuilder, now out of work and paralyzed from the right side of his face down to his right foot. Davis rarely speaks, and when he does, his speech is slurred, his words troubled.

“All they said to me was that it was the weather that caused this,” he said, laughing nervously. “They said it was cold and hot flashes. (Laugh) They said it was all kinds of things. (Laugh) I don’t know what they’re saying any more.”

Davis couldn’t go on. McQueen, obviously moved by his friend’s suffering, said: “When he came back, I cried when I saw how he looked.” Then McQueen started to cry all over again, and silence hung over the room.

Finally, Hicks spoke up. “Whatever this is, it’s in our blood,” he said. “If we aren’t going to get it out of us, we’d at least like to know what it is before we die.”

Until the VA comes up with a definitive diagnosis, Gulf War veterans are not eligible for disability compensation--a situation that some in Congress are trying to change because it leaves the veterans in limbo at a time they need help the most.

While the Pentagon only recently conceded that the number of the ill may be as high as “in the low thousands,” 10,000 veterans have signed a nationwide registry to see if they do now or might later exhibit any of the wide range of symptoms.

At the Birmingham VA medical center, doctors have already seen more than 600 veterans with mysterious symptoms. Another 110 patients are awaiting appointments.

Alabama sent the largest number of Reserve and National Guard troops to the Gulf War, and now this state appears to have the largest number of ailing veterans. Some of the units have seen half or two-thirds of their members come home sick, the veterans said.

Under the pilot program, the VA here is also rescreening all of the veterans and is setting up further medical examinations and other protocol tests. Officials also want to put the veterans through more psychological evaluations to determine if their problems might have been brought on by the heavy stress of war.

Also, because the symptoms are so diverse, researchers want to survey all the patients and begin categorizing their ailments, hoping to understand why different people are being afflicted in different ways.

When the veterans first came home and began complaining of problems, they were treated individually. It was only this past summer that VA officials began looking at them as a group, and two weeks ago the VA here began holding special clinics to advise the veterans and their families about the most current information on chemical and biological warfare symptoms. More than 100 veterans, their spouses and children crowd into the clinic meetings.

“I get 300 to 400 calls a day,” said Jeffrey A. Hester, staff assistant for community affairs at the medical center.

Some early findings indicate that chemical agents or man-made biological viruses may be responsible, although it may be impossible for VA officials to conclusively reach that diagnosis. Medical center officials said any exposure most likely would have been at low levels and, because it occurred almost three years ago, may remain forever elusive.

“We would love to be able to identify the root cause of all these problems we’re currently seeing,” said Dr. Robert H. Roswell, chief of staff at the medical center and head of its Persian Gulf clinic. “But to date we have not been able to.”

In New Orleans, Dr. Edward S. Hyman has successfully treated some veterans with anti-bacterial medication to reduce the itching caused by severe skin rashes. Encouraged by his work, Congress this month appropriated $1.2 million in Defense Department funds to evaluate Hyman’s findings and to continue his research.

One of those he treated was Sterling Sims, a 55-year-old Seabee from Birmingham.

Sims said he was treated by several VA physicians here, one who said he had athlete’s foot, another who called it “jungle rot.” He said he was given three blood tests, three urine tests, a chest X-ray, pills and ointments. “But nothing they did touched at these sores,” he said.

He next heard of Hyman and drove to New Orleans. After a five-hour visit there, he was placed on an anti-bacterial medication. So far, Sims said, it seems to be working, but it still does not answer the question of why he fell sick in the first place.

He recalled a Scud attack in the middle of the night: a loud boom and then a bright flash, followed by “something like raindrops hitting our tents.”

“The commanding officers passed it off as a sonic boom,” Sims said. “But let me tell you, you don’t get a fireball with a sonic boom.”

In an interview and in testimony before Congress, Jackson said he and other VA researchers are investigating whether the veterans were exposed to a toxin ingredient called “yellow rain,” which was used by Iraqi forces in the 1980s.

Roy Morrow of Phenix City, Ala., and William (Larry) Kay of Columbus, Ga., are two veterans who have been tentatively diagnosed by Jackson as suffering from a chemical/biological exposure. But the VA’s national claims office has yet to rule on whether the veterans should be awarded disability payments.

Morrow, 47, suffers headaches, night sweats, bleeding gums and diarrhea. “Dr. Jackson said the biological toxins are definitely alive in my system,” Morrow said. “And he said it was a cancer-causing virus.”

Kay, 52, is trying to hang onto his job as a firefighter in Columbus, but the increasing memory loss and other disabilities may catch up before he can retire on a full pension three years from now.

Kay, like other veterans, heard air raid sirens and scrambled for his protective gear. He remembered his gas mask was already lightly covered with a smoke-like substance even before he could slip it over his face.

“I think it was probably a milkshake--what we called a Scud loaded with chemical agents, nerve gas and a man-made virus,” Kay said.

He said that 28 of the 33 members of his Seabees unit are complaining of various symptoms and that many feel the Pentagon has been lying to cover up what really happened in the desert.

“We went over there to fight the war,” Kay said. “The government sent us over there. We come back and now I’m fighting another war with the federal government.”