| September
02, 2003 8:16 PM |
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MYSTERY ILLNESS-GULF WAR ll-KILLING OUR SOLDIERS-(LSG)
http://www.unsolvedmysteries.com/usm352235.html
CategoryConspiracy) Created8/9/2003 12:54:00 AM)
PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AUGUST 8, 2003
NEW REVELATION SURFACES ABOUT GULF WAR II MYSTERY
ILLNESS The American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGWVA),
an independent Gulf War Veterans support organization,
has long searched for answers to explain why nearly
half of the 697,000 Gulf War I Veterans are now ill
and why over 200,000 of those servicemen/women have
requested disability, but have received no adequate
diagnosis or treatment, from either the Department of
Defense (DOD), or Veterans Affairs. Though there have
been over 125 studies done by the government at the
cost of over $300,000,000 to the taxpayer, we still
have no answers as to what caused so many of our
soldiers to become ill. Meanwhile, the suffering
veterans are receiving little, if any, medical
treatment for this illness. It seems that whenever
veterans become ill, the term mystery illness seems to
be the first and often the only diagnosis that is ever
made. Veterans are then left to fend for themselves,
sick and unable to work, with little hope of a normal
life again.
The AGWVA is now again asking questions, this time,
about the newest mystery illness to hit the military.
After being pressured by a few independent news
reporters who have not permitted this mystery to
continue unabated, The DOD recently has been forced to
announce the mystery deaths of Gulf War II soldiers
and that at least 100 other men and women have become
ill. Again, however, there were no adequate answers,
but, only that the mystery illness diagnosis had
reared its ugly head again. According to a family
member of one of the military victims, the DOD
recently, has changed its label of the illness and is
now calling it pneumonia in sharp contrast to what a
physician on the scene reported. Due to continuing
pressure for sound answers, the DOD was again forced
to send an investigative team to Iraq, however the
convenient, repeated lack of diagnosis, unfortunately
translates into lack of treatment, and lack of
compensation for the veteran. The jury is still out,
however, if the DOD will be forthcoming with the truth
this time.
Contrary to the pneumonia and mystery illness labels,
enlightening information surfaced today on THE POWER
HOUR radio show (www.thepowerhour.com) in an interview
with Mark Neusche, father of Josh Neusche, one of the
GW II troops to lose his life from the mystery illness
while serving in Iraq. The father stated that his
20-year-old healthy son, a former track star and
non-smoker, had written home on June 26th explaining
that he would be going on a 30-hour hauling mission,
but that he could not disclose what they would be
hauling. The son had stated that he had been to the
Palace of Sadaam Hussein, and it was later learned
that he was hauling at the Baghdad Airport.
Marsha Paxson also appeared on the show, as she is the
journalist who broke the U.S. story for the Lake Sun
Leader (www.lakesunleader.com). Although the facts
behind this story are continually changing, Ms. Paxson
is one of the few journalists who is remaining true to
the facts of the original story. Ms. Paxson revealed
in her articles that the father reported that his son
was not the only ill soldier. Neusche stated that
while his son was in a coma at Landstuhl Hospital, the
father overheard the nurses say that they were
expecting numerous sick troops to be brought in all at
one time. In fact, the father actually witnessed
approximately 55 other troops being received by the
hospital after they were transported by a military
ambulance (bus). According to the father, the
transported troops were exhibiting varying degrees of
the illness. Some walked, some were in wheelchairs and
others were on respirators. In the commotion, a doctor
reported to the father that his son was suffering from
a toxin. No mention of pneumonia was ever made to him,
nor was it ever reported in the medical record.
Paxson and the AGWVA now question the diagnosis, the
actual number of troops that were reported ill, and
when the DOD first became aware of this incident.
One of the most surprising statements to come from The
Power Hour interview conducted on The Genesis Network
was that while the son, Josh Neusche, was a healthy
young soldier on June 26, 2003, when he reported that
he was going to serve on the secret hauling mission,
by July 1, 2003, he was in a coma, and that day was
suddenly classified by the military, as medically
retired from the Army without Josh or his family's
consent. Josh did not die until July 12, 2003. Among
other problems that this new classification created
was that the DOD was no longer obligated to assist the
family in getting to Germany to be with their son as
he lay in a coma. Because the DOD would not provide
even so much as plane or taxi fare for the Neusche
family, all 650 members of the 203 Engineer Battalion
each contributed $10.00 to make the family's final
visit possible.
The AGWVA is demanding answers in a timely fashion and
according to spokesperson Joyce Riley, We will not
tolerate another whitewashing of a tragedy against our
veterans. It has happened too many times before with
our failure to safeguard our troops, adequately
diagnose and effectively treat the victims of Agent
Orange spraying, Project Shad
shipboard-experimentation, and Gulf War Illness I.
This time someone has to be held accountable. Ms.
Riley closed by saying, Speaking out for our past and
present sick veterans is the best way for Americans to
support our troops!
The interview with Mark Neusche and Marsha Paxson can
be heard at: www.thepowerhour.com click on the GWII
mystery illness interview. For more information on
Gulf War illnesses, go to www.gulfwarvets.com
For more information on Project Shad, go to
www.projectshad.org
A reply to this post on the original site:
Date:
8/9/2003 6:57:00 AM From
Authorid: 22852 Kelly,
I do not think they put something in all the
shots but I have to admit that I would not be
surprised if they put something in some of
them.
A
very dear friend of mine also fought in the
first Gulf War and he has 4 children, 3 born
before that and 1 born after the war, sadly
the one born after the war has so many health
problems that the Doctors can not give a
reason for that. My friend
rejoined the Army just so he would have
medical benefits to help his son, he does
believe the baby's problems are due to him and
his time in the Gulf War.
Sadly
this man is now fighting in this war. He has
been over there since the day they sent over
the first troops.
As
for the Anthrax shots, yes my son did not fair
well with those and since he did just have a
another booster shot that may explain his hatefulness. 
Reply:
I believe I have found the
chemicals that caused Gulf War
Syndrome
Please
pass this info on to your friend you
talk about here.
Your
friend is at risk for more and more
harm which would be so unfair to him
and to his family. I hope that
he is not being exposed still to the
chemicals that harmed him in the
first place, because if he is, his
diagnosis will become worse and
worse.
Thank you for helping our
troops
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| September
12, 2003 |
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Still no answers unless you believe smoking is the
cause 
Washington Post
September 12, 2003
Pg. 1
Troops' Pneumonia Outbreak Spurs Medical Hunt
By David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer
Lt. Col. Janice M. Rusnak, recently arrived at the
U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, for a
tour as infectious-diseases specialist, walked into
the third-floor intensive care unit. She didn't know
the name of the patient she wanted to see. But she had
what she considered a fairly good description.
Can you point me to the soldier from Iraq who's on a
ventilator? she asked a nurse. The one with acute
respiratory distress syndrome.
Which one? the nurse answered. We have three.
Three cases in one place -- pretty strange, the
50-year-old Rusnak remembers thinking.
Rusnak's observation that morning in late July was the
opening chapter of a medical whodunit -- the end of
which still hasn't been written. Although it has
identified a surprising suspect, the military is still
in the midst of a full-scale investigation to trace
the source of a rare, and occasionally fatal, illness.
What's clear so far is this: Since early March, about
100 soldiers deployed to the Persian Gulf region and
Central Asia have contracted pneumonia. About 30 have
been ill enough to be sent to hospitals in Europe or
the United States. In medical slang, 19
"crashed" within hours of getting sick, not
responding to antibiotics and requiring mechanical
ventilators to breathe for them. Two have died.
On the day she walked into the Landstuhl hospital,
Rusnak was looking for a patient about whom she had
been told several days earlier in an e-mail from
doctors at the Army's 28th Combat Support Hospital in
Iraq. They had a soldier with severe pneumonia whom
they were thinking of evacuating to Germany. They were
worried, and a little spooked. They had recently had a
similar patient -- a 24-year-old sergeant with
pneumonia who also needed a ventilator. He had gone
into cardiac arrest and died while being prepared for
a flight out.
There's a saying in medicine that an
"outbreak" is when you see one more case of
a disease than you expect. Here were four young
soldiers from Iraq sick enough with pneumonia to need
machines to breathe for them, and one had died. This
was not something Rusnak could easily pass by.
And she didn't.
Before the day was over, she and colleagues at
Landstuhl notified Army epidemiologists in the United
States that they might be looking at some sort of
outbreak. What or how extensive it was, they weren't
sure.
Nothing obviously links the cases, the severe ones in
particular. There is no evidence the illness is passed
person to person. The 19 people -- 18 men and one
woman -- were stationed across 2,600 miles, from
Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to Uzbekistan in
Central Asia, with most in Iraq. They had a variety of
military occupations. Only two were in the same unit,
and they became ill six months apart.
Overall, the incidence of pneumonia in deployed troops
has not been wildly out of line with what is expected.
It's the number of severe cases that's unusual -- that
and the fact that 10 of them showed proliferation of
uncommon immune system cells called eosinophils.
Whatever the disease may be, it is clearly rare. It
may even be new. The military's interest, however,
isn't academic. It wants to learn what's going on so
it can prevent future cases.
The investigators are working in the long shadow of
Gulf War syndrome, a grab bag of illnesses and
physical complaints that emerged after the 1991 war
against Iraq. The Pentagon was accused of not paying
enough attention to that problem, and doesn't want a
repeat of that experience.
Although the pneumonia outbreak and Gulf War syndrome
differ in nearly every important characteristic, the
Army is going after this one aggressively, deploying
investigative teams, searching old records for similar
cases and consulting civilian experts from the start.
"Whether that reflects some hypervigilance -- I
would say yes, it probably does. I would say I think
we're much more sensitive to it because of the Gulf
War experience," said Col. Robert F. DeFraites,
an epidemiologist and senior preventive medicine
officer in the Army surgeon general's office.
In many ways, it is a classic investigation of a rare
medical event. Unlike outbreaks of diarrhea and
bronchitis, where there's an unmistakable spike in
cases and the issue is what's causing them, outbreaks
of rare conditions begin with a more basic question.
Is anything really happening here? Is there a new
signal coming out of the usual background noise?
Janice Rusnak thought she did hear a new signal. On
the other side of the Atlantic, at the Army's Center
for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine at
Aberdeen Proving Ground outside Baltimore, Col. Bruno
P. Petruccelli thought he heard one, too.
"On one day, sitting here in my office, two
things happened," Petruccelli recalled recently.
First, he received a copy of several e-mails Rusnak
had sent from Germany to colleagues at the Army's
infectious disease research center at Fort Detrick in
Frederick. She described the rapid downhill course of
several pneumonia cases she had seen. Electronically
clipped to one message was a dramatically abnormal
chest X-ray of a young soldier, the lungs nearly
"whited out" with fluid, a condition often
presaging death.
Then came another e-mail message, this one from a
woman in Kuwait working for the Army team that samples
soil, air and water at encampment sites. She had heard
that the local military hospital had seen an unusual
number of pneumonia cases. She even gave a number --
17. The subject line of the message was
"mysterious disease."
Shortly after he had read both messages, Petruccelli
got a call from the doctor at Fort Detrick who had
forwarded Rusnak's e-mails. He wanted to talk about
them.
"You couldn't have done it better in Hollywood.
It all kind of blows in on one day," Petruccelli
recalled.
The military has a long history of making discoveries
in epidemiology and medicine. Its closely observed
population of mostly young healthy people is one in
which the odd cases are likely to be noticed -- if
your eyes are open to them. Already, doctors in the
Iraq theater had noticed a number of infections in
both American and Iraqi casualties caused by
acinetobacter, a relatively rare microbe found in
soil. The pneumonias were another blip worthy of
attention.
Over the next two weeks, Rusnak and a military
epidemiologist in Landstuhl tabulated cases of
soldiers with pneumonia who had been sick enough to be
flown out for treatment. They came up with 15 --
possibly an incomplete count, they thought -- and
described them to Petruccelli and DeFraites in a
conference call on July 3.
That afternoon, those two physicians held another
conference call with stateside military doctors, one
of whom suggested patching in Stephen M. Ostroff, an
infectious-diseases expert at CDC and head of a
committee of civilian advisers called the Armed Forces
Epidemiological Board.
"I remember telling them that in my experience,
when healthy young adults develop a typical bacterial
pneumonia, if they get a whiff of antibiotics they
tend to turn around fairly quickly. It's unusual for
people this age to deteriorate," Ostroff recalls.
"I strongly conveyed to them that this needed to
be looked into, without question."
There were hints these strange cases might not be
infections at all. Many of the sickest patients had
deteriorated with a speed rarely seen in bacterial or
viral pneumonias. The soldier for whom Rusnak went
looking in the Landstuhl ICU was a good example.
A soldier in his early twenties, he played volleyball
the afternoon he got sick and after dinner was
watching a movie when he suddenly became so breathless
he thought he might pass out. The only other thing
unusual that evening was a slight nosebleed. By the
time he arrived by helicopter at the 28th Combat
Support Hospital near Baghdad, he had a 102-degree
fever and was struggling to breathe. Within six hours
of his first symptom, he was on a ventilator.
A case from Uzbekistan in April was similar: a young
soldier who felt well, then had 12 hours of mild chest
tightness and shortness of breath before he needed a
machine to keep him alive.
This picture is more typical of an out-of-control
immune system reaction than an infection.
On July 12, a second soldier died of multi-organ
failure in Landstuhl. He had had a day of chest pain
and breathlessness before being put on a ventilator on
June 30.
On July 17, the Army surgeon general launched an
investigation.
Although the count of about 100 cases of pneumonia
since March 1 through mid-August turns out to be about
what one might expect, what was unusual were features
of some -- but not all -- of the severe cases.
Of the original 19, four had evidence of bacterial
infection. There was no evidence of other infectious
respiratory diseases -- no severe acute respiratory
syndrome, influenza, Legionnaire's disease, hantavirus,
mycoplasma or fungal infections. Even more peculiar
was what laboratory tests did show -- large numbers of
the usually rare eosinophil cells in the blood or
lungs -- and sometimes both -- of 10 patients.
Occasionally, exposure to chemicals or specific drugs
can cause such cells to proliferate. When large
numbers turn up in the blood -- a condition called
eosinophilia -- in someone taking many medicines, it
is usually chalked up as a drug reaction.
There didn't appear to be any drug that had been taken
by the 10 patients, but they did have one thing in
common. All were smokers, and nine, including one who
died, had started or resumed smoking during the
deployment.
One of the nine was Lt. Cmdr. Glen Todd. The
47-year-old Navy nurse-anesthetist was working in a
hospital in Djibouti when he woke up in a breathless
sweat the night of Aug. 6. His condition worsened
rapidly, and he was evacuated to Landstuhl, where he
was put on a ventilator Aug. 8.
Todd is the oldest of the 19 patients who became
seriously ill. He had smoked for several years in his
twenties, but quit. In May he started again,
eventually getting up to a half-pack of cigarettes a
day and two cigars at night.
"Why does anybody smoke or why does somebody
drink a beer once in a while?" he asked
rhetorically in a telephone interview from his home in
Great Lakes, Ill., where he is recuperating. "I
think I started smoking over there mostly as a social
thing."
Like many of the patients who needed ventilators, he
turned around quickly and was off the machine in a few
days, with no apparent lasting damage to his health.
Smoking predisposes a person to pneumonia, and of the
entire group of 19 people on ventilators, 15 smoked.
Nevertheless, the eosinophilia in new smokers seemed
more than just a coincidence to Maj. Andrew Shorr, a
lung specialist in Landstuhl. He found 12 intriguing
papers published by Japanese physicians in the past
six years. They reported cases of the rare disease,
most of them in teenagers who had recently started
smoking. All recovered quickly, sometimes with the
help of steroids, which decrease inflammation. The
researchers had re-exposed several to cigarette smoke
to see if the eosinophilia returned, and it did.
There was also a 1999 paper published by two Army
doctors in the journal Military Medicine who reported
two cases of severe pneumonia with eosinophilia in
soldiers at Fort Irwin in Southern California. Both
were smokers.
Speaking from a Baghdad rooftop on a satellite
telephone recently, Col. Bonnie L. Smoak, an Army
physician leading the investigation in Iraq, said an
epidemiologist there is surveying a sample of deployed
soldiers to see how many recently began smoking.
As to the ultimate explanation of the dangerous
pneumonias, there is no shortage of theories.
Although the investigators are still searching for and
reviewing the records of all pneumonia cases, at least
some of the 19 severe cases are sporadic,
garden-variety cases caused by infection. But the
patients with eosinophilia are probably a subgroup of
their own.
If they were all smokers, what else might they share?
Was there a "second hit" they all got that
hasn't yet been identified? Was there some common
environmental exposure? Did it have something to do
with the desert? Was there a genetic predisposition
that made them vulnerable?
Is it also possible that after a century in which
hundreds of millions of people started smoking that a
brand-new disease caused by the habit could turn up in
2003?
"I am skeptical about that," DeFraites said
recently. "The big question to me is -- why here
and why now?"
The last case occurred Aug. 19. The Army isn't
convinced it's the last. The search for the culprit is
narrowing, but it's not over.
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| October
19, 2003 |
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If the following makes you mad then contact your local
news outlets, and see if they will pick up the story,
or if you fell like really wasting your time contact
our Congress reps and ask to have something done.
Sick, wounded U.S. troops held in squalor
By MARK BENJAMIN, UPI Investigations Editor
FORT STEWART, Ga., Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Hundreds of sick
and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in
the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks
here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see
doctors.
The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living
conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so
poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying
push them out with reduced benefits for their
ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no
more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14
through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day.
"I have loved the Army. I have served the Army
faithfully and I have done everything the Army has
asked me to do," said Sgt. 1st Class Willie
Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation
Company. Buckels served in the Army Reserves for 27
years, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and the first
Gulf War. "Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army
has changed. I am treated like a third-class
citizen."
Since getting back from Iraq in May, Buckels, 52, has
been trying to get doctors to find out why he has
intense pain in the side of his abdomen since doubling
over in pain there.
After waiting since May for a diagnosis, Buckels has
accepted 20 percent of his benefits for bad knees and
is going home to his family in Mississippi. "They
have not found out what my side is doing yet, but they
are still trying," Buckels said.
One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at
Fort Stewart -- home of the famed Third Infantry
Division -- as heroes on their return from Iraq,
approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army
Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of
spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy
field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or
illnesses.
The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what
the Army calls "medical hold," while the
Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what
benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result.
Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a
day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others
described waiting weeks or months without getting a
diagnosis or proper treatment.
The soldiers said professional active duty personnel
are getting better treatment while troops who serve in
the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow
in medical hold.
"It is not an Army of One. It is the Army of two
-- Army and Reserves," said one soldier who
served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which she
developed a serious heart condition and strange skin
ailment.
A half-dozen calls by UPI seeking comment from Fort
Stewart public affairs officials and U.S. Forces
Command in Atlanta were not returned.
Soldiers here estimate that nearly 40 percent of the
personnel now in medical hold were deployed to Iraq.
Of those who went, many described clusters of strange
ailments, like heart and lung problems, among
previously healthy troops. They said the Army has
tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries
and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing
condition," prior to military service.
Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in
rows of rectangular, gray, single-story cinder block
barracks without bathrooms or air conditioning. They
are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat
and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds
in each barrack.
Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches
through the sandy dirt to a communal bathroom, where
they have propped office partitions between otherwise
open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on
an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is
full of bugs, because many windows have no screens.
Showering is in a communal, cinder block room.
Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper.
They said the conditions are fine for training, but
not for sick people.
"I think it is disgusting," said one Army
Reserve member who went to Iraq and asked that his
name not be used.
That soldier said that after being deployed in March
he suffered a sudden onset of neurological symptoms in
Baghdad that has gotten steadily worse. He shakes
uncontrollably.
He said the Army has told him he has Parkinson's
Disease and it was a pre-existing condition, but he
thinks it was something in the anthrax shots the Army
gave him.
"They say I have Parkinson's, but it is
developing too rapidly," he said. "I did not
have a problem until I got those shots."
First Sgt. Gerry Mosley crossed into Iraq from Kuwait
on March 19 with the 296th Transportation Company,
hauling fuel while under fire from the Iraqis as they
traveled north alongside combat vehicles. Mosley said
he was healthy before the war; he could run two miles
in 17 minutes at 48 years old.
But he developed a series of symptoms: lung problems
and shortness of breath; vertigo; migraines; and
tinnitus. He also thinks the anthrax vaccine may have
hurt him. Mosley also has a torn shoulder from an
injury there.
Mosley says he has never been depressed before, but
found himself looking at shotguns recently and thought
about suicide.
Mosley is paying $300 a month to get better housing
than the cinder block barracks. He has a notice from
the base that appears to show that no more doctor
appointments are available for reservists from Oct. 14
until Nov. 11. He said he has never been treated like
this in his 30 years in the Army Reserves.
"Now, I would not go back to war for the
Army," Mosley said.
Many soldiers in the hot barracks said regular Army
soldiers get to see doctors, while National Guard and
Army Reserve troops wait.
"The active duty guys that are coming in, they
get treated first and they put us on hold," said
another soldier who returned from Iraq six weeks ago
with a serious back injury. He has gotten to see a
doctor only two times since he got back, he said.
Another Army Reservist with the 149th Infantry
Battalion said he has had real trouble seeing doctors
about his crushed foot he suffered in Iraq.
"There are not enough doctors. They are
overcrowded and they can't perform the surgeries that
have to be done," that soldier said. "Look
at these mattresses. It hurts just to sit on
them," he said, gesturing to the bunks.
"There are people here who got back in April but
did not get their surgeries until July. It is putting
a lot on these families."
The Pentagon is reportedly drawing up plans to call up
more reserves.
In an Oct. 9 speech to National Guard and reserve
troops in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bush said the
soldiers had become part of the backbone of the
military.
"Citizen-soldiers are serving in every front on
the war on terror," Bush said. "And you're
making your state and your country proud."
-0-
Mark Benjamin can be contacted at mbenjamin@upi.com
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| October
22, 2003 |
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sad how it takes, exposure to the press for the government
to do what it should in the first place.
Army Sending Aid To Injured
United Press International
October 21, 2003
WASHINGTON - The Army said Monday it is sending
doctors to Fort Stewart, Ga., to help hundreds of sick
and injured soldiers, including Iraq veterans, who say
they are waiting weeks and months for proper medical
help.
Many of the Army Reserve and National Guard personnel
in "medical hold" at the base are living in
steamy cement training barracks that they say are
unacceptable for sick and injured soldiers.
The Army said in its statement that it would spend
money to improve those living conditions and is
dispatching a team to look into the soldiers'
complaints.
"The Army does acknowledge that medical hold
challenges exist -- across the Army as well as Fort
Stewart," according to the statement. The Army
"is absolutely committed to taking care of our
people."
At the Pentagon, Army Public Affairs Specialist Steven
Stover said officials would try to use findings about
the problems at Fort Stewart to improve conditions in
the future.
"Is this happening? Yes, it is," said
Stover. "What we learn from this incident is
going to help the Army when we have other major units
returning" from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Stover said Director of the Army Staff Lt. Gen. James
L. Lovelace Jr. dispatched the "assessment
team" after a series of meetings among high-level
Army officials on Friday, Saturday and Monday.
On Friday, United Press International reported that
the soldiers were languishing in hot cement barracks
here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see
doctors. They have to walk to a nearby latrine.
Steve Robinson, a veterans advocate with the National
Gulf War Resource Center who visited the barracks last
week, said Monday he was glad the Army acted.
"The NGWRC is pleased that the Army will address
the soldiers' concerns," Robinson said. "As
a former non-commissioned officer who retired after 20
years of faithful service, I was disturbed by the
reports from the soldiers in medical hold."
Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who heads a key
veterans' committee, is set to dispatch staff to Fort
Stewart on Tuesday, said his spokeswoman, Shana
Stribling.
Several of the National Guard and Army Reserve
soldiers said the way they are being treated makes
them believe the Army is trying push them out with
reduced benefits for their ailments. They also said
that regular active duty personnel are getting far
better treatment.
While soldiers are on hold, the Army decides how sick
or disabled they are and what benefits -- if any --
they should get as a result. One document shown to UPI
stated that no more doctor appointments were available
from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day.
The soldiers estimate that around 40 percent of the
nearly 600 personnel in medical hold were deployed to
Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of
strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among
previously healthy troops. They said the Army has
tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries
and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing
condition," prior to military service, a charge
the Army denied.
The Army said Monday it has "shifted professional
staff from regional medical facilities to Fort Stewart
to help reduce the backlog where appropriate."
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Comment
- Concern for chemical exposures in war time since mid 70's |