Dirty Bombs

MINNEAPOLIS (Herald de Paris) - I like to think of myself as an optimist. A glass half full sort of person. I like to believe most people are kind, that my community is a safe and sound place, that my neighbors are decent folk. I like to think our country is woven from a more or less virtuous moral fiber, that while not perfect we do our best to be a just and fair people, and I believe in our constitution. There are times however when these beliefs take a beating and I end up wondering just what the hell is going on? How could we allow certain things to happen? And, even worse, how in the world do we forgive ourselves for failing to be accountable?

Nine years ago now my nephew Billy came to live with us here in the great Midwest from a small Greek island to attend the University of Minnesota. Shy, tall and thin, his dark hair and dark skin set him apart from most, as did his accent. It was quite a transition, from a place where a blistering sun is the norm to a virtual urban tundra, but he did well and people liked him. He promptly made a friend, a good friend — Gus. I’d heard about him before I met him, outgoing, confident, ambitious, veteran of the Gulf conflict, ex Marine, Billy painted a picture considerably more imposing than the affable and disarming guy I eventually got to know via playstation in the basement. Gus was pretty easy to like, he was funny and engaging and didn’t take himself too seriously, a likable kid, and being an ex Marine myself he pretty much got an automatic thumbs up. We had lots of talks about the Corps, boot camp, and good natured bantering about how things had changed, how (in my opinion) San Diego MCRD (recruit training depot) didn’t compare with Paris Island because the abominable sand fleas were absent in San Diego, about how we didn’t get issued sunscreen at P.I. But my time in the service didn’t compare to his in one important way (although I never told him), he’d seen some action during the 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign whereas mine was a relatively peaceful tenure — Gus fired off live ordinance at live targets both from sea as well as in the occupied no-man’s-land bordering Kuwait and Iraq — a landscape strewn with the charred artifacts of the Iraq War. He was a good friend to Billy, he didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, stayed focused on his studies and his dreams, and was always good for a laugh.

It feels now like that time went by in the blink of an eye. With their degrees all but completed they both went their separate ways. Gus got married in September 2002 to a gal named Marti and they moved to Texas and started a family. He finished his BA at the University of San Antonio and landed a great job with Union Pacific Rail Road — Manager of Yard Operations. Billy sure enough went back to his Island paradise and his Greek sweetheart. We stayed put of course somewhere between these two incidental friends from across worlds, raising our own growing family. Things didn’t turn out the way I would have guessed. Something terrible caught up with Gus, something I don’t think anyone saw coming.

The following is from an abstract on a study conducted by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research institute:

The use of depleted uranium in armor-penetrating munitions remains a source of controversy because of the numerous unanswered questions about its long-term health effects. Although no conclusive epidemiologic data have correlated DU exposure to specific health effects, studies using cultured cells and laboratory rodents continue to suggest the possibility of leukemogenic, genetic, reproductive, and neurological effects from chronic exposure. Until issues of concern are resolved with further research, the use of depleted uranium by the military will continue to be controversial.

The above study was completed in March of 2007 and was essentially a compilation of data and evidence from other studies on the effects of Depleted Uranium, studies which have in the past and which continue to suggest that Depleted Uranium has a leukemogenic (leukemia causing) effect on biological organisms. In yet another study by Arfsten, Still, and Ritchie at the Naval Health Research Center, there was strong evidence that DU accumulates in tissues including testes, bone, kidneys, and brain and that this particular heavy metal alloy is both genotoxic and mutagenic, which is to say it can effect a cell’s genetic integrity in addition to having carcinogenic properties. Yet the United States, Britain, and France continue to veto U.N. resolutions banning these munitions even in the face of overwhelming international consensus.

Additionally, the World Health Organization continues to maintain their position that Depleted Uranium, as a residual byproduct of open combat, has not been proven to cause any adverse responses. The official Dept. of Defense position is that depleted uranium poses marginal if any collateral risk through exposure because it is relatively “depleted” of its radioactivity, it is a cheap and readily available waste product of our many nuclear reactors. DU shells have been around for quite some time, but the government has tiptoed around the issue of its dangers by adhering to the argument that this ordinance is safe because of it’s reduced radioactivity.

The problem with DU ordinance, however, is that it is incendiary in addition to being remarkably dense and will burn and oxidize when fired, particularly upon impact with other metals — and the Government has known this for quite some time. When these shells are fired the risk is not from radiation, it is from the toxicity of the metal itself in what are called embedded particles.

These particles can lay dormant in tissue for up to ten or more years and still manage to trigger an astonishingly lethal flurry of leukemogenic activity in a matter of a few weeks. The odd thing is that the DOD itself has produced this research, clearly implicating DU in a specific and rare form of leukemia, and while steps have been taken to ensure treatment for those contaminated, the marching orders remain the same, that DU is a relatively safe and necessary risk to ensure supremacy on the battlefield.

Gus was a gunner during December 1998 Operation Desert Fox. We’d spoken occasionally about his experiences there. He described traversing miles of highway still littered with burnt out hulks of Iraqi tanks, armor, and personnel carriers, the awesome sandstorms, and the remarkably sophisticated armaments he’d been trained to deploy. It is estimated that somewhere between 500 and 1000 tons of depleted uranium ordinance was used in the the first Gulf war, the majority of which is still scattered in the sand dunes between Iraq and Kuwait where Gus served time.

Vehicles literally cut to shreds by DU ordinance still pock-mark the otherwise sterile landscape. Gus was certainly there, and his exposure to this particularly toxic heavy metal ordinance could have taken place in any number of ways. Anyone who’s fired large caliber ammunition can tell you, you are left covered in the metallic residue produced by superheated shell casings, particles could have been inhaled, ingested from dust on an MRE (meal ready to eat), through any contact with relics of the previous war, in the water, in a small cut, or simply through the skin. Whether he was exposed at some point during his tenure to Depleted Uranium is probable.

Whether it was through incidental contact, or inhalation is perhaps unknowable. What is certain is that early in October of 2007 Gus felt a lump on his head just under his scalp and he began to experience excruciating back pain. The pain eventually became so bad that he couldn’t stand or walk.

He went to the doctor and a CT scan was ordered. He was sent to the hospital that very day. The diagnosis was Acute Leukemia (AML), a form that his doctors had never encountered and for which there was little if any protocol. Gus deteriorated rapidly and less than 6 months later, at 8:10 pm on March 28, 2008, Gus passed away, leaving behind a wife and three small children.

Almost a year to the day after Gus’ death just this past March 25th, another study was published again by the Armed Services Radiologic Research Institute authored this time by Miller, Stewart and Rivas, which pinpointed a specific chemical pathway called DNA methylation — by which DU induces leukemia. The data in this particular study are presented as evidence that aberrant DNA hypomethylation is clearly associated with DU Leukemogenisis.

I am left to try and disseminate the particulars of this tragic story via a timeline of information and research authored primarily by scientific entities under the Department of Defense. Gus’ service time was years after initial repots of Gulf Syndrome (and the role of Depleted Uranium) had surfaced. The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) research is essentially the reverse of what one may deem a conflict of interest. It is for this reason that I’m focusing on this data in particular — the studies are self implicating — they are sponsored by the Department of Defense itself. The research, dating back to 2002, categorizes the use of DU as “controversial” as there were clear leukemogenic effects in vitro (1) — so we’ve known for a very long time that this stuff is potentially lethal.

The lack of human subjects might be cited as a source of some skepticism, but chemical pathways in recent studies, in particular DNA methylation, tend to not only reflect consistent effects across different organisms, the very same chemical process is in fact implicated in a number of other non DU cancers. DNA methylation (the replacement of a hydrogen atom with a methyl group) has in fact been implicated as a carcinogenic mechanism in DNA unrelated to Depleted Uranium from as far back as a 1998 study published in the journal of Nature by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (2).

Depleted uranium is a toxic and incendiary heavy metal blasted from a gun barrel into another hunk of metal creating a readily ingestible aerosol which can remain dormant and embedded in human tissue almost indefinitely and which clearly can trigger DNA methylation — an aberrant metabolic pathway. Depleted Uranium possesses 60% of the radioactivity (for up to 50 years) of naturally occurring uranium, and some estimates suggest that more than 20% of a DU shell is aerosolized into inhalable particles on impact, and clearly, via research from the Dept. of Denfense itself, it has a causal role in the sudden onset of Acute Leukemia.

Carl Gust Danielson, a healthy man in his late twenties and a father of three, died of a rare form of leukemia after participating in military theater of operations where an agent was widely used which has been found to cause rare forms of leukemia. The military to date has performed no substantive epidemiologic studies on Gulf War Veterans to even ascertain whether cancer rates and mortality data are as skewed as some media outlets would suggest — 3 to 5 times the normal rate depending on the source.

Gus’ wife has somehow managed to put a life together for herself and her three children in the wake of this tragedy. She decorates her children’s bedrooms with teddy bears made from Gus’ old shirts and tells them stories about their dad, but his absence is a mournful silence in a childhood that would have otherwise been as happy as that of any three children anywhere. The youngest will never remember his dad, the second, will never have her dad to walk her down the isle, the oldest will never learn about cars, sports, and all the other things that dads pass on to their children.

Why? Because, as the evidence suggests, our government went ahead with the use of a dangerous heavy metal with known radiologic and toxic properties, essentially because it was cheaper than Tungsten, a metal with similar density but without the unique hazards of Depleted Uranium. We have stores of Depleted Uranium laying around, why not make ammunition out of them and let our sons fire it off in the far reaches of the earth? Who cares that it causes cancer, let that be our legacy to warn any other potential enemies, the bottom line is we must win at any cost, and our soldiers? our Marines? Well, perhaps they are casualties as well?

Gus’s wife and children could have at least been presented with a purple heart, or a combat related death benefit, instead they get a small social security pension for the children, and an empty seat at the dinner table.

When I consider this, I lose some of that optimism, some of that faith that we are a fair and benevolent people, and I am left a little less certain that we are the just and righteous nation that my hope tells me we are. I still salute the flag, I still place my hand on my chest during the national anthem at ball games, but the thought of letting my children enlist in our military fills me with a dread that is a little more pronounced.

Gus died of exposure incurred on the battlefield which amounts to a combat related injury. How long this particular “injury” took to manifest it’s lethal outcome is not relevant to the plain fact that the initial exposure/injury took place in live combat. The injury was not accidental or the result of any negligence on Gus’ part. If anything comes of this article, the two things that I’d like to see are: first, a broad systematic epidemiological study of combat veterans from 1992 to the present to investigate cancer onset, type, incidence, and severity, and secondly, to any and all victims of this particular form of Leukemia who were participants in a combat zone in which Depleted Uranium munitions were deployed, their families should be awarded a purple heart and a full combat related death benefit.

To presume that anything less might suffice, is to risk validating the notion that the lives of our sons and daughters are only worth the relative nickels and dimes saved by using DU over other more expensive metals.

Sources:
(1)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19324073

(2)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v395/n6697/full/395089a0.html

(3) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16283518?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=1&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

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