More Gulf Lore

Our March cover story, "Gulf Lore Syndrome," garnered a greater than usual amount of reader commentary, both positive and negative. Here is a sampling of those letters, along with author Michael Fumento's response.

From the June 1997 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

Point 3: Let me simply reprint what I wrote: "PB was experimental or investigational only in the sense of its ability to prevent illness from nerve agents. The drug itself comes from a class of pharmaceuticals that has been in use since 1864. Far from being �unlicensed' [as Gannett's John Hanchette had claimed], it was licensed by the FDA in 1955 to treat a neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis." Last I heard, methyl alcohol wasn't licensed by the FDA to be taken internally.

Bell is wrong when he says that "the troops were still taking more [PB] than what some myasthenia gravis patients take, not less." Why? Because the troops took that dosage for about a week; myasthenia gravis patients take it for life. Further, as Bell notes, the range for myasthenia gravis is from 60 milligrams all the way up to 1,500, while the soldiers took 90 milligrams. Granted, all drugs will have side effects in some portion of the population, but with all drugs those effects are more likely to occur and more likely to be severe at the high end of dosage range, not the low end. The vets were almost at the bottom of the range, a full 1,410 milligrams from the top.

Finally, the question is: How can side effects of a drug that washed out of the body in a day continue for years? Is it possible to have no side effects at the time but develop them years later? That's the incredible case Bell is trying to build without the least bit of evidence.

Point 4: Let's see. It's OK to consider everything the Pentagon says a lie but to take at face value testimony from people who claim their vomit glows and their semen burns like "napalm," to quote the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune?

Dannie Wolf seems shocked to hear that even members of elite units could suffer hysteria- related illness. But hysteria-related illness has been observed in American soldiers ever since the Civil War, when it was called "soldier's heart." Later it was called shell shock, and later still other names. All these soldiers were "trained to accept pain and drive on," and if Wolf thinks the average Gulf War vet was tougher than the men who fought at Gettysburg and Antietam, he needs to brush up on his history. Finally, Wolf's apparent reference to the soldier who claimed to have developed cancer within a few days of arriving in the Gulf, and his willingness to believe it despite being told this is a medical impossibility, indicates only that no amount of scientific evidence is going to affect some GWS true believers.

Janie Angus says that among the things I missed are the "308 DOD Missing GulfLink Files." Well, maybe that's because they were missing. All I know about this is that some files were removed from the GulfLink Web page, then put back on. Since they were there at one time, even if they weren't all put back, no doubt somebody downloaded them, and they are thus hardly lost forever. Ms. Angus's implication, of course, is that since the known files show no evidence that Americans were exposed to chemical weapons at doses high enough to cause illness, all the evidence must be in the unknown ones. Oliver Stone would find that a compelling argument, but logicians call it a nonfalsifiable one--one that can be neither proved nor disproved.

I haven't the slightest idea of what she's talking about when she refers to research in Kuwait and Glasgow, but I find it interesting that no sooner does she mention these than she rejects the work of a Canadian medical historian, in part because he's "foreign"! Would it make her feel better if she knew that a just-published book by Elaine Showalter called Hystories devotes a whole chapter to GWS as a classic example of epidemic hysteria? She's a professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

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