Feb-Mar-97

What Happened To Those Yellow Ribbons?

Remember the touching days when citi-zens hung yellow ribbons on trees and telephone poles to wish Godspeed to our soldiers who were going to fight in Iraq? To fight the new Hitler, President Bush said, to fight Saddam Hussein, who planned to attack Saudi Arabia, then cross to Europe and attack the free world, we were told. To get that million man army to fight for the New World Order, the National Guard had to go, those part-time soldiers appointed to guard our shores against outside enemy attack. "Don't worry," Bush said, "You'll only be gone a short time. Tell your boss to hold your job for you."

Now many of those vets are dead, and some wives and children are sick and may be dying too from chemical and biological warfare agents from their own country! The symptoms reported by vets can be due to biological warfare agents or to chemical warfare exposure or irradiation. The Presidential Advisory Report confirmed that more than 43 tons of chemical warfare agents are known to have rained down on soldiers.

"We were guinea pigs," Gulf War veterans declare-guinea pigs for the mystery shots (contents never explained and never pretested widely even on laboratory animals), the siren warnings of toxins (warnings they were told were false alarms), the chemical and biological agents that the U.S. army blew up after hostilities had ceased (agents that Iraq had stored to dilute for agricultural purposes) which filtered over the 130,000 troops still on the field. These agricultural agents are war chemicals from WW II, sold to the Iraqis by U.S. corporations. They are diluted to kill pests that afflict food crops, but Iraq stored them in their original form, fully capable of killing people-not only U.S. soldiers but British, French, and Czechoslovakian soldiers, and civilians in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps a registry of vets who have come forward to ask for a physical exam. More than 80,000 have signed up. Another 20,000 have signed up on the Pentagon Gulf registry. Research by the Veterans of Foreign Wars show that only about half of the vets who are sick are going to the government for assistance. Those who are on active duty are quickly discharged from service.

Individual Gulf War vets report that when they applied to veterans hospitals for diagnosis and medical care, they were told, "I can only test you for ticks and fleas," "You have a nervous condition," or "Stop focusing on your health and get a life." Some were called "cry babies" and told to "act like a man." One vet was told he was tied to his mother's apron strings." In a way he was, as his mother also became ill and both of his sisters died of the illness now called "Gulf War Syndrome."
"It's a plague, it's a holocaust," Air Force nurse Joyce Riley declares, speaking for the Gulf War Veterans on Art Bell's radio program. The condition is being concealed, denied, and goes untreated, she says. The information that does come out is sparse and downgraded to a few unusual cases, not the hundreds of untreated cases that go undiagnosed by veterans hospitals. Most treatments have been useless, though Joyce Riley believes that some traditional drugs and a number of naturopathic methods are effective. She offers a phone number plus a video and copies of government documents to interested parties. These are free to Gulf War Vets and $20 to others. Vets can call (800)-201-7892, Ext. 40. Non- vets, (281) 587-5437.

The latest informant about the Gulf War Syndrome is Patrick E. Eddington, former high-level CIA analyst and author of Gassed in the Gulf, due out in February. Eddington, recently interviewed on KPFA's Flashpoints, quit his job when the CIA refused to deal openly with the issue of Gulf War exposure to chemical agents. His research, based on soldiers' eyewitness accounts, on Department of Defense documents, and the Senate Banking Committee Reports, discloses that the DoD knew beforehand the danger of chemical agent exposure. If the experimental drugs were intended to protect our soldiers, what about the troops' gas masks with a failure rate, claims Eddington, of between 26 and 44 percent? The VA estimates the number of vets affected by chemical agents is well over 100,000, but Eddington estimates the true number at close to a quarter million. If the DoD and the federal government accept even part of the blame, that would make 697,000 people who served in the Gulf War eligible for VA benefits-a massive budget item that would make Congress shudder.

The yellow ribbons are now long gone. So have many of the soldiers they represented. Of the almost 700,000 regular army troops that served in Desert Storm, 200,000 have registered with the VFW as seriously ill. As of December 1996, there is still no program to treat them. Desert Shield Veterans in Texas plan to go to the UN to make their appeal. For more information, call Paul Sullivan, the Gulf War Resource Center: (202) 628-2709, Ext. 162. In California, call the Gulf War Veterans of America at (510) 482-4931 or (415) 247-8777.

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