Our Troops In Iraq Are Coming Home Sick

By James Donahue

August 2005

It is like Gulf War Syndrome all over again. After months of tromping around in the hot desert sands and breathing the dust, fumes, chemicals and noxious clouds of smoke and soot in Iraq, the men and women of our fighting forces are getting sick.

Possibly for life.

And only a few of us are speaking of it. You don’t hear this story on your nightly news. The military offers no statistics when we are given a casualty list. In fact, some believe the military’s official death count is carefully fudged to make it appear that fewer soldiers are dying in that war. We have no statistics for civilian casualties, or troops who come home ill.

Writer Stan Goff in an article for Counter Punch, states that there is a strange kind of ‘pneumonia’ breaking out among the troops, which he believes may very well be related to inhalation of microscopic particles of the highly toxic and radioactive depleted uranium.

The Gulf War Syndrome appears to have so many variations in the way it attacks victims that it is difficult for physicians to pin down any one cause, such as uranium poisoning. Radiation from uranium exposure seems to be showing up first in the children of Iraqi veterans and citizens who are born genetically deformed.

Psychic Aaron C. Donahue sees the syndrome as something far different. He says it is the result of a wide variety of assaults on the body from ancient micro-organisms stirred up in the dust from all of the bombing.

He says the deep bombing has exposed both encapsulated and non encapsulated pathogens that have been buried in the dry desert sands in the Middle East for thousands of years. They were organisms that existed back when the Earth was young and the area where Iraq is located was in the heart of a rain forest, a rich and fertile area once known as the Fertile Crescent.

The pathogens are many and varied, and the contemporary human body has no memory of them. Soldiers with strong immune systems can resist the effects of these bugs, but the others are showing strange symptoms of diseases that are new to the human race. As they go home from the wars, they are passing these diseases on to their families and friends.

This is why the Gulf War Syndrome is a difficult problem for doctors to describe and resolve, Donahue says.

The symptoms range from chronic pain to stomach disorders, rashes, swelling, fever, depression and anxiety.

The illnesses also appear to be chronic, and many patients test positive for mycoplasma and or Lyme Disease.

Dr. Garth Nicolson, President of the Institute for Molecular Medicine, and Joyce Riley, spokeswoman for The American Gulf War Veterans Association, say they believe the syndrome from the 1991 Gulf War is spreading to the general public. Because the symptoms are so varied the disease is being divided into separate labels.

In fact, one medical writer has suggested that doctors are inventing disease labels for conditions that may be variations of several causes.

Thus our troops are not only being exposed to new toxins, they are being radiated by tiny fragments of depleted uranium blowing around in the dust. But there is more.

They are fighting in a super heated desert environment and not getting enough water to meet their needs. Many soldiers may be tempted to drink the local water which is not safe. The sewage treatment plants are out of order and the water there is laced with viruses and bacteria. New diseases, like a virulent form of Hepatitis E has appeared and doctors are reporting cholera, dysentery and typhoid making an appearance among the Iraqi people.

Goff wrote in his story that the military considers soldiers as expendable equipment and consequently, after a soldier leaves the service and returns home, the Department of Defense goes to great lengths to avoid responsibility for medical problems. This is why the veterans of the first Gulf War have had to fight so hard to have Gulf War Syndrome recognized as a legitimate problem caused by that conflict.

“Note how many millions have been spent by the US government to deny that Gulf War Syndrome existed, and how hard they’ve fought liability for Agent Orange,” Goff wrote.

Agent Orange was a toxic anti-foliage herbicide laced with PCBs and dioxin that was sprayed over the jungles of Vietnam. This chemical obviously had an effect on the men who got near it.