Gulf Lore Syndrome

Why are the Gulf War vets getting sick? You won't find out by reading The New York Times and USA Today.

Michael Fumento from the March 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 9)

And although Bradley said that the suited-up Topalski was "the only man in this group who is not sick," Topalski told me, "I never once told Bradley I was healthy. I said I had a lot of problems, but I said they could be attributable to something else" besides the Khamisiyah blast. The other vets I interviewed confirmed he had said this. He said he also told this to producer McGuirk, three weeks before the show aired. Yet Bradley's false statement was left in.

I called McGuirk, who told me she had no reason to think that Martin wasn't a credible witness. When I told her that some of the other vets claimed she ignored vital information they gave her, she said, "I'm not going to talk to you any further. I'm afraid I have to get off the phone." She hung up. Ed Bradley did not return my calls.

Syndrome Over Science

To doctors, bizarre symptom claims like glowing vomit are a ready indicator that they are dealing with a patient suffering hysteria. "It's an old joke around ER; we ask if people's stools glow in the dark or if their hair hurts," Dr. Scott Kurtzman, assistant professor of surgery at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, told me. But to the media, such symptoms are the makings of a great story. Kate McKenna's article, "The Curse of Desert Storm," in the March 1996 Playboy, didn't mention Brian Martin's vomit but said that he is "often confined to a wheelchair" because of "a diarrhetic condition that has damaged his spine." (Emphasis mine.) Perhaps the makers of Kaopectate should advertise that it may be effective in preventing spinal injury.

McKenna and other reporters have also alerted us to the claim by Persian Gulf vets' wives (including Kimberly Martin) that their husbands' semen is burning and blistering them. "Shooting fire," they call it. Life magazine mentioned it in a cover article about vets' kids ("The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm"), later a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Hanchette and Brewer at Gannett built a whole article around it, declaring, "Sometimes the semen causes blisters, rashes and itching on exterior skin." They didn't write that somebody reported such an occurrence; they just stated it as a fact.

Skin blistering from semen, like Elvis sightings, has provided lots of claims but never any verifications. I talked to several VA doctors, all of whom said they've heard about the phenomenon but have never actually seen any such blistered or burned skin. In fact, some women do develop allergic reactions to semen, according to Dr. David Bernstein, an allergist at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, who has studied the "burning sperm" claims. He says the reaction is typically simply redness of the skin inside or outside the vagina. But blistering? "Personally, I've never seen that," Bernstein said politely. But Dr. Marvin Ligator, director of the toxicology and epidemiology department at the University of Texas Medical Branch, burst out laughing when I asked him about it. As to whether something the vets were exposed to could cause any seminal reaction at all, Ligator said, "There are chemicals we know of that get into semen, but I've never heard of anything that causes burns or irritation." Bernstein concurred with Ligator.

Such bizarre symptoms may sound absurd. But to a vet who hears them through the grapevine and then sees them validated in print, they're horrifying. "There's been one soldier who died because his brain turned to mush," a 37th Engineer vet told me. "A softening of the brain matter is very well known" as a symptom of GWS, he explained.

A key component of Gulf Lore Syndrome entails suspending the laws of science whenever necessary. Consider the first death widely attributed to GWS, that of Army Reservist Michael Adcock. Adcock died in 1992 at the age of 22 from what began as a lymphoma (cancer of the lymph glands) and then spread to the rest of his body. Without doubt he believed--as his mother Hester testified before Congress--that he had contracted the lymphoma from exposure to something in the Gulf. His last words, she said, were, "Mama, fight for me. Don't let this happen to another soldier." The congressmen listened solemnly, and the media faithfully reported the story. But Army Surgeon General spokeswoman Virginia Stephanakis told me that Adcock "had rectal bleeding [the first symptom of his lymphoma] six days after arriving, and the family blamed it on the Gulf." It is universally accepted by the medical community that lymphomas take years to develop, perhaps 10 or more years on average. Not months, not weeks, and certainly not days.

Likewise, former Navy Seabee (combat engineer) Reservist Nick Roberts claims to have contracted his lymphoma within weeks of what he claims was a nerve gas attack. Roberts is almost as popular with reporters as Brian Martin. The AP, USA Today, States News Service, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and Esquire in its cover story on GWS have all portrayed Roberts as a prototypical GWS victim, using such headlines as "Walking Wounded" and "Trail of Symptoms Suggests Chem-Arms." I've talked to Roberts, and I'm sure he's convinced of what he says. But his claim is a medical impossibility, and none of the stories about him bothered to make that clear.

Roberts appeared before Shays's committee on the same day as Martin, so I called Robert Newman, the Shays staffer who invited them both to testify. I asked Newman first about Martin's daily spewing of glowing vomit. "In the overall scheme of things," Newman told me, "that's got to be a minor point." Well, OK. What about Roberts's lymphoma? "Do you know how long it takes a lymphoma to develop?" I asked Newman. "It takes a long time to develop," Newman said. "So you're willing to concede that Roberts's lymphoma couldn't have had anything to do with exposure from something in the Gulf?" I asked. "I'm not going to concede anything," he said.

No, he certainly wasn't. It is part of the strategy of the lore spreaders that you never, ever admit that any vet's claims are incredible, or that even a single veteran anywhere might be suffering psychosomatic illness. Newman ended our conversation by saying, "You caught me at a bad time because I'm in another crisis. Call me tomorrow." I did, and several times after that. We never talked again.

It is bad enough that the media and Congress always treat Persian Gulf vets as experts in self-diagnosis, but they're even considered experts in diagnosing others. Roberts told a congressional panel in November 1993 that of the 33 members in his military reserve unit, 10 in addition to him have been diagnosed with lymphomas. Were that true it would probably be the most amazing cancer cluster in history. He also held up a list of what he said were 173 cancer-stricken Gulf veterans, and the media duly reported his comments. Yet five months later, an update of the Persian Gulf Registry showed only eight lymphomas out of all the Gulf vets in the country, with 38 cancers of all types.

There have been reports of mysterious illness clusters throughout the GWS scare. Vets or their spouses will call other vets, essentially doing their own epidemiological study. Often they conclude that they are suffering an abnormal amount of illness. They then contact the media, who publicize these "findings," gingerly referring to them as "unofficial investigations."

The Institute of Medicine looked at three such reports, including one involving Nick Roberts's reserve Seabee unit. In all three cases, the IOM found that, while the symptoms tended to be the same among the three groups, these were classic psychosomatic manifestations. The outbreak studies, said the IOM, "were not successful in demonstrating that these symptoms occurred at a higher rate among PGW [Persian Gulf War] veterans than among [other] PGW-era veterans, or that these symptoms could be linked to specific medical diagnoses or exposures."

The most famous of the self-diagnosed clusters occurred in Mississippi, involving alleged defects in the babies of vets. These reports added a whole new dimension to the disease. Among the heart-wrenching stories built around the "cluster" were "Gulf Syndrome Kills Babies," "A Town in Torment," and Ladies Home Journal's "What's Wrong with Our Children?"