THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 21, 1996 TAG: 9609210252
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP SHENON, THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: COLUMBUS, GA. LENGTH: 322 lines
While the Pentagon continues to insist that it has no evidence that U.S. troops were made sick from exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, more than 150 veterans of a Naval reserve battalion have come forward with details of what many of them describe as an Iraqi chemical attack that has left them seriously ill.
Members of the unit, the 24th Naval Mobile Construction Battalion, say something exploded in the air over their camps in northern Saudi Arabia early on the morning of Jan. 19, 1991, the third day of the gulf war.
Within minutes, many say, their skin began to burn, their lips turned numb and their throats began to tighten. Several say chemical alarms began to sound as a dense cloud of gas floated over their camps.
``I put my gas mask on right away, but by the time I got to the bunker, my hands and face were burning, and I couldn't breathe,'' said Roy Butler, a 53-year-old former Navy petty officer from Columbus, Ga., who served in the 24th and who now said he suffers from chronic fatigue, joint aches, memory loss and mysterious gastrointestinal ailments and rashes - all symptoms that are considered typical of ``Gulf War syndrome.''
``Right after I got into the bunker, my lips started turning numb, and the numbness lasted for several days'' Butler said. ``We washed down and that seemed to help, but people started coming up with blisters.''
Battalion commanders later insisted that the explosive noise was actually a sonic boom and that there was no need for alarm. But within weeks of the blast, many of the men of the 24th were sick with debilitating ailments that, they say, have lasted to this day.
Until this spring, the Defense Department had denied that it had any evidence suggesting that large numbers of U.S. troops were exposed to chemical weapons in the gulf war. Then in June, it acknowledged that soldiers in an Army unit, the 37th Engineer Battalion, could have been exposed when they destroyed an ammunition depot in southern Iraq in March 1991 that was later determined to have contained sarin, a deadly nerve gas.
In disclosing that incident, the Pentagon originally suggested that 300 to 400 troops might have been exposed to chemical weapons at the depot. Wednesday, the Defense Department said a second explosion at the same depot a week later raised the figure to more than 5,000 troops.
Pentagon officials continue to insist that they have no evidence of other large-scale exposures. They said they had reviewed the incident involving the 24th Battalion in Saudi Arabia and found no sign of unusual illnesses.
Several of the Navy reservists called a reporter after the Pentagon's earlier announcement about the 37th Engineer Battalion, saying they believed that they might have also been exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons.
Of the nearly 750 reservists in the 24th Naval Mobile Construction Battalion who served in the unit in the gulf, 152 veterans were interviewed for this article; 114 said they were sick with illnesses they attribute to the war. Dozens say that they have repeatedly been hospitalized and that they have been forced to give up their jobs and careers.
Their accounts, strikingly consistent, and supported in some important points by newly declassified documents, present a new challenge to the Pentagon, which has come under intense criticism over its handling of the claims by thousands of gulf war veterans who say they were victims of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. The Contradictions: Similar ailments and explanations
Scientists remain baffled by the ailments suffered by gulf war veterans, with some researchers suggesting that troops may have been exposed to low levels of Iraqi chemical or biological agents.
Pentagon officials and other researchers remain skeptical, noting that there is still no clear evidence showing that gulf war veterans are more sickly than other troops, or that the chemicals involved could have produced the broad range of symptoms reported.
But many of the veterans are clearly ill. Of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the war, 80,000 have sought special government health screenings to determine whether they are suffering from ailments related to the war.
In a statement prepared in response to a reporter's questions, the Pentagon confirmed that a review of its battle records showed that the loud noise heard by members of the 24th Battalion on Jan. 19, 1991, was probably the explosion of an Iraqi Scud missile.
That contradicts initial reports from battalion officers who insisted in 1991 that the noise had been a sonic boom produced by a jet fighter or bomber passing overhead.
But although the Iraqis had threatened before the war to arm their Scud missiles with chemical and biological weapons, the Pentagon said it had thoroughly investigated the complaints of members of the 24th Battalion. The statement said that the burning skin and other discomfort reported by the reservists in the camps were not consistent with a chemical attack, and that the ailments were probably caused by rocket propellent.
Still, that leaves open the mystery of why so many veterans of the 24th Battalion report they are now sick with similar ailments, and why their illnesses began shortly after the mysterious explosion over the desert skies of Saudi Arabia that January morning.
Chemical weapons were detected in the camps in northern Saudi Arabia on Jan. 19, in the areas around the city of Jubail, where the 24th Battalion was stationed.
Newly declassified combat logs maintained by an officer working for Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the war, reported a ``chemical attack at Jubail'' early on the morning of Jan. 19. A separate entry in the log shows that a British soldier reported that night that chemical-detection paper had registered ``mustard positive,'' a reference to mustard gas.
Harold J. Edwards, a reservist who was a member of the 24th battalion, remembered using three chemical detection devices, which are known as M-256 kits, to measure the air after he heard the explosions that morning. Two of the three tests, Edwards said, showed that mustard gas was wafting over the reservists. ``It's damn hard to mess up those tests,'' he said.
The Pentagon said that the mustard-gas detections identified in Schwarzkopf's logs later proved to be false alarms, and that a reservist stationed a few miles away from Edwards had used similar detection kits and found no chemical agents.
In its statement, the Defense Department said that rocket propellent could produce false alarms on detection equipment, and that this was probably the explanation for Edward's findings for mustard gas. But that assertion is in some doubt, possibly even within the military itself.
A spokesman for the U.S. Army Chemical School in Fort McClellan, Ala., the military's premier training center for chemical specialists, said the school knew of no research suggesting that the rocket propellent, Red Fuming Nitric Acid, would cause a false positive on an M-256 kit. ``No, we have not tested with that particular compound,'' said Hershal Chapman, the spokesman.
The interviews with the Naval reservists and an exhaustive review of confidential military documents and combat logs about the incident also show the following:
Gulf war veterans from the 24th Naval Construction Battalion and the Army 37th Engineer Battalion, the unit that blew up the Iraqi ammunition depot in March 1991, describe remarkably similar health problems: gastrointestinal problems; mysterious tumors and rashes, chronic fatigue and memory loss.
The 1994 Navy study that found no special health problems among gulf war veterans of the 24th Battalion appears to have been based on an incomplete investigation. Navy investigators interviewed veterans who had remained in the reserves, ignoring scores of other gulf war veterans who had left the reserves - or who had been forced out - for health reasons.
(``There are currently no indications that would lead us to believe that active-duty members were any different from those who left active duty,'' the Pentagon said, explaining why the former reservists were not interviewed.)
Several gulf war veterans who remain in the 24th Battalion said in interviews that they were sick with what they described as war-related ailments. But they said they could not reveal their illnesses to the Navy for fear that their outspokenness would result in dismissal from the reserves on a pretext of health problems, often at the cost of their military pensions.
A doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs who has cared for many gulf war veterans from the 24th Battalion said the Pentagon and the department were ignoring obvious evidence that the veterans had been made sick by their service in the gulf war, possibly through exposure to chemical or biological weapons.
``There's something going on,'' said the physician, Dr. Charles Jackson, who works in the Veterans medical center in Tuskegee, Ala. ``I don't know what they're hiding.'' The explosion: "Yellow-green fog," "a burning sensation"
What happened in the dun-colored northern deserts of Saudi Arabia at 3 a.m. on Jan. 19, 1991, the third day of the allied attack against Iraq in the gulf war, remains a terrifying memory for many members of the 24th Naval Mobile Construction Battalion.
The battalion, a reserve unit based in Huntsville, Ala., was made up of about 750 construction specialists, or Seabees, drawn from across the southern United States. Many of them were Vietnam War veterans who had returned to civilian life and had chosen to remain connected with the military through the reserves.
During the war, most of the reservists were housed in two camps a few miles apart near the eastern port city of Jubail, along the Persian Gulf.
``I remember getting woke up by this humongous explosion - it almost knocked us out of our bunks,'' said Butler, who retired from the reserves in 1991, after 26 years of military service, because of the health problems that he says began with the explosion that night. ``I'm a Vietnam War vet, and my thoughts were that it was a rocket.''
Several reservists said they were instantly convinced that the explosion was caused by the detonation of one of the Iraqi Scud missiles that had begun to rain down nightly on Jubail and other cities in Saudi Arabia during those early days of the war.
It was a thought, they said, that terrified them, given the threat of Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, to arm the missiles with toxins drawn from his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Jerry Jones, a 53-year-old mechanic from Leicester, N.C., said, ``The concussion was so strong that it knocked me to my knees.'' As he ran to a bunker, he recalled ``a yellow-green fog or mist floating through the air.'' And it was then, Jones said, that his skin began to burn.
``I went to the bunker and what skin I had exposed, like my hands and my neck, had like a burning sensation to it,'' said Jones, who said he was forced to take early retirement from the North Carolina government because of ailments that developed after the war, including chronic fatigue and memory loss. ``The seal broke on my protective mask around my jaw, and my lips had a numbing sensation.''
Robert R. Nesselrotte, a 63-year-old retired technician from Columbus, Ga., said it took him about three minutes to find his rubberized chemical-protective suit and pull it on. By then, Nesselrotte said, it may have been too late.
``I noticed that my lips felt numb, like I had Novocain, and I could taste a funny taste - metallic, like you had licked your tongue over a piece of metal,'' he said. ``I noticed my neck and my cheeks were burning, and I knew for sure enough we'd gotten gassed.''
Nesselrotte says he suffers today from severe fatigue, chronic headaches, spasms in his limbs and daily bouts of nausea.
``Before the war, I never had a serious health problem,'' he said. ``I was one of the healthiest guys there was. Now I wake up every morning feeling sick.''
For Edwards, the petty officer who had the chemical-detection equipment, there was no mystery about what was going on. The 24th Battalion, he said, was under attack from mustard gas.
He recalled pulling on his gas mask and chemical suit and testing the wind with M-256 detection kits. The M-256 is a hand-held chemistry set that measures the air for chemical weapons; tiny glass ampuls are broken above litmus paper that changes color, depending on what chemical agents are in the air. The kits are considered highly precise.
``When the sirens go off, I had a habit of getting the test kits out,'' Edwards said. He recalled that two of the three test kits detected mustard gas.
Edwards, 54, who is still in the reserves, said he was still healthy, as were the troops who worked with him, because he insisted that they learn to pull on their chemical-protection suits at the first sounding of an alarm.
``I could put one on in probably 15 seconds,'' he said. ``All my guys could do that because we practiced our rear ends off.''
Many of the reservists from the 24th Battalion who have since gotten ill, he said, were those who had failed to pull on their suits and gas masks.
``A lot of guys had the idea that a macho hombre can't get hurt,'' he said.
Edwards said he immediately reported the mustard-gas detection to his superiors in the camp. But the next morning, he said, the word came back from the officers that ``nothing had happened, forget it, don't say anything.''
Edwards said he had feared that he would be disciplined if he continued to discuss his detection of chemical weapons. ``What do you do?'' he said. ``You shut up.''
Other members of the battalion say they quickly came to suspect that the military was trying to hide the truth of what had happened that morning. Their suspicions began, they said, when officers in the 24th Battalion told them that the blast that morning had been caused by a sonic boom from a jet fighter or bomber passing overhead. The reservists said they were ordered not to discuss the matter again.
``Nobody believed it was a sonic boom - nobody,'' said James Johnson, 38, of Phenix City, Ala., who complains today of severe respiratory ailments, chronic diarrhea, fatigue and rashes ``all up and down my legs and forearms.''
``I've been in the military most of my life,'' he said, ``and I know that a sonic boom doesn't leave a flash of red light in the damn sky.''
In a statement, the Pentagon said that there may have been a sonic boom - but that it was produced by the missile that exploded, not by a plane. James Turner, a Defense Department spokesman, said he did not believe that there had been any attempt to deceive the reservists. ``There's been no attempt by anyone I'm aware of to deceive anybody,'' Turner said.
An officer in the 24th Battalion, Lt. Craig Young, said he continued to believe that the noise over the desert sky early that morning was caused by a sonic boom from a plane.
``I honestly believe it was a jet flying over, a sonic boom,'' said Young, 33, who lives in Atlanta. ``I doubt that this was something that caused health problems.''
Asked about the accounts by Edwards that he had reported the detection of mustard gas that morning to his superiors, Young denied it.
``If there was a positive response from Edwards, I would have known about it,'' he said, suggesting that Edwards was a braggart who was making up the story. ``He would go around telling stories to a lot of young petty officers way before this incident.''
But Young confirmed that he and other officers had urged members of the 24th Battalion not to discuss what had happened in the sky over their camps on Jan. 19, for fear that rumors of a chemical attack might spread, disrupting morale.
``We put out to the first-class petty officers that you shouldn't go around talking about this stuff,'' said Young, who said he had remained healthy since the war and who is still in the reserves.
``I wouldn't call it an order, but we did say, `Hey, look guys, keep your guys calm, keep them focused.' '' He said Edwards ``probably was told separately to keep his mouth shut,'' although this was not meant as a ``cover up or anything.'' The military records:Two allied teams detected nerve agents
Military logs maintained for Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf War, suggest that something did happen early on the morning of Jan. 19 near Jubail, where the men of the 24th Battalion were stationed.
The newly declassified logs were obtained last year by a veterans group, the Gulf War Veterans of Georgia, under a Freedom of Information request. They show that at 4:30 on the morning of Jan. 19, U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia received an alert of a ``chemical attack at Jubail.''
Because the document was edited by the Defense Department on security grounds, it is not clear from the document who sounded the alert.
At 4:40, the log shows, a British soldier in the region - the logs do not identify the soldier by name - reported that chemical-detection paper was ``getting a mustard positive.''
The logs show that after a time, ``there were no positive readings,'' suggesting that if mustard gas had been released in the area, it had dissipated to the point where it could no longer be detected.
That same day, chemical weapons were detected elsewhere in northern Saudi Arabia. Detection equipment manned by Czech soldiers found low levels of nerve agent at two separate locations near the Saudi city of Hafr al-Batin, about 200 miles northeast of Jubail.
A team of French troops also reported ``infinitesimal amounts of nerve and blister agent'' that day in the vicinity of the sprawling military complex at King Khalid Military City, which is near Hafr al-Batin.
The Pentagon has officially described the Czech detections as ``credible,'' given the sophistication of the Czech equipment, but the Defense Department has said consistently that it has no evidence that U.S. soldiers ever came into contact with the chemical agents that were detected by the Czechs.
Pentagon officials have said that French chemical equipment is less reliable. Still, according to a Defense Department report on the issue released last month, the French report ``cannot be discounted.'' The symptoms: Formerly healthy men now report sickness
Whatever happened on the morning of Jan 19, 1991, there is no doubt that many of the reservists who served with the 24th Naval Mobile Construction Battalion are ill, and that they are suffering from the same host of ailments that are commonly dubbed Gulf War Syndrome: chronic fatigue and headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, rashes, aching joints and memory loss.
But like thousands of other gulf war veterans, the men of the 24th Battalion say they face a wall of resistance when they seek medical care for their ailments, especially from the Veterans Administration hospitals that many of them turn to because they lack the money for private health care.
``The VA is not concerned,'' said James L. Hallman, 48, a 24th Battalion veteran from Remlap, Ala., who has suffered from chronic fatigue, headaches, joint pains and respiratory ailments since the war.
``If you're not shot or wounded by shrapnel or there's some other obvious physical injury, then they say you're not sick, that you don't deserve anything,'' he said. ``They say it's in your head.''
Jackson, the Veterans Administration physician in Tuskegee, said he had treated more than 20 gulf war veterans from the 24th Battalion and that he was ``convinced that there was some chemical exposure in the gulf - there's no question in my mind about it.''
Still, he said, the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs seemed unwilling to listen to the evidence. ``This is not psychological,'' he said. ``These people are sick.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jerry Jones, 53, of Leicester, N.C., recalled ``a yellow-green fog
or mist floating through the air'' after the 1991 blast.
KEYWORDS: GULF WAR SYNDROME VETERAN CHEMICAL GAS MUSTARD
GAS PERSIAN GULF WAR by CNB