[Peace-discuss] Beyond the call of duty

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY 

By: Clare Mellor, Staff Reporter 

The Halifax Herald Limited 

Saturday, April 4, 1998. 

One in seven American soldiers and an estimated 20 per cent of Canadians who 
served in the Gulf is sick. For them, and their families, the horror of war 
still rages as they fight a minefield of red tape for compensation and battle 
for their lives. 

EVEN SLEEP doesn't offer Terry Riordon any refuge from the pain that has 
haunted him every day for the past seven years. 

At night when the screams begin, his wife of 20 years tiptoes across the 
hallway separating their bedrooms to nurse him through the terror. 

"Sometimes you have to hold his face because it's falling off, or take 
imaginary maggots out of his ears with Q-tips, pull worms out of his 
head....or take a warm wash cloth and wipe off the blood." Susan Riordon 
says. 

Sitting in their Yarmouth bungalow on this grey, rainy day, the petite 
43-year-old says she's "more of a widow than a wife." 

The last time she saw her husband was when he boarded a plane for the Persian 
Gulf War in December 1990. 

"This country would have done my husband a great kindness to send him home in 
a body bag than to let him be destroyed weekly," she says. "He has been 
robbed of his mind, his life, his body. He doesn't live. He exists." 

A former military police offer, Terry spent two months in Dubai, United Arab 
Emirates, planning escape routes and providing security for the Canadian 
military and its allies. 

"I suppose after being there a couple of weeks I started to feel different," 
he says. 

The 44-year-old returned home to Halifax with a migraine headache - the first 
he's ever had in his life. 

Shortly after, like hundreds of Canadians who came back from the Gulf War, he 
became mysteriously ill with things like memory loss, severe joint and muscle 
pain, headaches, shortness of breath, blurred vision, mood swings, muscle 
spasms, and chest pain. 

Soon, he could no longer run or remember how to use a computer, then he 
started suffering from "night terrors." 

It's no longer safe for his wife to sleep with him. 

"This is a man trained in unarmed combat,"she says. "You can't make any 
sudden movements. I've been pinned against the wall and court martialled a 
few times." 

The number of Canada's Gulf War veterans plagued by symptoms is expected to 
become public in May when the military releases the findings of a health 
survey of 4,500 veterans. 

U.S. studies have found that as many as one in seven Gulf War veterans have 
been suffering various ailments since they returned from the war. 

In Canada, many veterans can't work because of the illness - dubbed Gulf War 
Syndrome by some - but many get no disability pension from Veterans Affairs. 

The syndrome - like environmental illness - has sparked controversy within 
the medical community. 

"I'm always very careful not to use the term 'Gulf War Syndrome' because I 
think it suggests (it) is a new illness when in fact it is not," says Col. 
Scott Cameron, head of the Canadian military's medical services. 

Cameron, a general practitioner who sits on the military's advisory committee 
on Gulf War Illness, says no new syndrome has been found in 104 veterans 
examined at Ottawa's Gulf War clinic in Ottawa, the first of five, including 
Halifax, set up across the country to treat veterans. 

"Most studies to date have found Gulf War veterans do report health 
complaints at a higher rate than people who did not service in the Gulf. 
However, when you ...examine them, you find they are suffering from definable 
illnesses," Cameron says. 

Except for the stress of war, five major U.S. studies haven't found any links 
between Gulf service and symptoms. 

But smaller studies at the University of Texas - to be expanded this year 
with increased government funding - have detected nerve damage and mild, 
generalized brain damage in some veterans. 

The damage, commonly fund in victims of toxic chemical poisoning, has been 
linked to exposure to a combination of two pesticides troops used to fend off 
insects and pyridostigmine bromide, taken to protect against nerve gas. 

In another study, the Institute for Molecular Medicine in California found 
insidious bacterial infections in the blood cells of 76 of 170 Gulf War 
veterans, and treated them with antibiotics. 

Terry was no longer able to function at his last posting as chief of base 
security in Shilo, Man., so he retired from the military in 1995. 

His health has deteriorated to the point where the former marathon runner and 
computer security expert can no longer walk to the store or fill out a form. 

"There are days when he is in so much pain he will sit on the floor and rock 
back and forth holding his head crying because he can't tolerate (it)," says 
Susan. 

He leads a grim life of bed rest, doctors' appointments and 45 medications. 

Even so, the Riordons, who have a daughter, 25, and son, 18, believe they are 
luckier than several other families they know affected by the illness. 

"There are very few of us who are still married," says Susan. "There are one 
or two that I know of that are actually street people. There are some that 
are living on welfare. 

"We're older and our children are older. Coping with small children and Gulf 
War Illness, I honestly don't think I could do it." 

WHILE TERRY sleeps, Susan writes a second appeal to Veterans Affairs for 
coverage of the Alzheimer drug Aricet, which improves Terry's memory and 
cognition. He is on his sixth prescription - at $150 a month - but Veterans 
Affairs has so far refused to pay for it. 

"With the drug, I get my husband back for one to 10 hours a week," Susan 
says. "To me, it's worth it." 

In her fight for an adequate pension for Terry, she has appeared before two 
Veterans Affairs review boards and routinely files appeals. 

Today, he gets a partial pension, but it takes Susan several hours of 
paperwork a week. 

"I've been reduced to a paper beggar," she says. "I appear in offices as a 
file number asking and begging for help for my husband." 

"That is the main part of my life." 

In 1996, the Defence Minister David Collenette told the Commons defence 
committee that there's an impression Canada is not tending to Gulf War 
victims. He planned to set the record straight. 

He ordered a review of cases that had been turned down for disability pennon, 
and made it clear that veterans with an illness resulting from service in the 
Gulf would qualify. 

But today, many veterans still get nothing because doctors can't diagnose a 
disease recognized by medical science. 

And many ill veterans can't navigate what Susan Riordon calls the Veterans 
Affairs "minefield" of red tape. 

She's encouraged by Veterans Affairs' recent promise to review her husband's 
case. But she says the department has never explained what it covers and how 
to file a claim, let alone launch an appeal. 

Louise Richard says it's an all-too-familiar story. 

The 37-year-old former military nurse has been ill since she returned from 
the Gulf, where she served as a surgical assistant in a desert in northern 
Saudi Arabia, near the Iraqi border. 

Among other symptoms, she has lost all the hair on her head and body. 

"It took me over three-and-a-half years to get a pension, fighting appeals, 
getting doctors to write letters," the Ottawa resident says. 

"They want scientific data, clear-cut diagnoses that Canada recognizes." 

She says the onus is on veterans to prove they're ill because of service in 
the Gulf. 

But at Veterans Affairs, Janice Summerby says 40 of 131 veterans who applied 
for disability pensions are getting at least some sort of payment. 

"(Payments) are based on the extent of the disability," Summerby says. 

"We don't drive what is medically recognized, the community does. And to 
date, they haven't determined if there is an underlying (Gulf) cause." 

Forty-nine veterans have had their claims rejected, and 15 are still waiting 
for an answer. 

The rest are no longer on file - for various reasons. Summerby says. 

Most illnesses in Gulf War veterans have absolutely nothing to do with the 
Gulf, says Lt-Col. Ken Scott, the military's expert on the issue. 

"They are just normal problems you would expect the population to develop 
over a period of time. ...People get migraines, people develop asthma, those 
sorts of things," says the internal medicine specialist." 

But Richard says there is nothing normal about her illnesses. 

Since the war she has suffered from blurred vision, asthma, thyroid problems, 
liver damage, and irritable bowel. At 34, she had a hysterectomy due to 
hemorrhaging. 

She strongly suspects her bad health is caused by exposure to a "cocktail of 
chemicals" that began even before she left for the Gulf. 

"We got (vaccinations) all at one, which I think was a grave error," she 
says. 

Richard was among some Gulf military personnel who got an anthrax vaccination 
to protect against biological weapons. 

"I had a huge reaction where the arm was three times the normal size," she 
recalls. "It formed a huge boil on my arm, and it was oozing, red and 
disgusting." 

"I was told never to receive any more because it would most probably kill 
me." 

In a desert, she took the anti-nerve gas pill, and was regularly exposed to 
pesticides. 

"When we had prisoners of war coming in, we'd use organophosphates or 
pesticides because they were covered with parasites and lice," she says. 

"I got sick in the desert. I had hypersalivation, urine incontinence. I was 
mentally in a fog. I was coughing up sputum, my nose was running like a 
faucet." 

WHILE THE U.S. has spent a bundle ($27 million in 1997) searching for causes 
and treatments for Gulf War Illnesses, Canada, Richard and the Riordons say, 
has taken little action. 

"No one is keeping us informed on what other nations are doing, or what 
Canada has to offer," Richard says. 

Other than trying to determine the number and types of veterans' complaints, 
Ottawa has conducted no medical research. 

That's "largely because there is so much research going on worldwide," Col. 
Cameron says. 

"Our number of people who served is so small in comparison." The U.S., for 
example, sent 700,000 military personnel to the Gulf War. 

In 1995, the Canadian military sent letters to veterans and set up a 
temporary toll-free line urging those with health problems to come forward. 

It also hired an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto to do a random 
health survey. 

After finding Canadian veterans' symptoms mirrored those of vets in the U.S. 
and Britain, Dr. Anthony Miller recommended the military fund a comprehensive 
health survey, and set up a scientific advisory committee to monitor the 
issue. 

In January 1997, an Ottawa consulting firm got $420,000 to compare the health 
of Gulf War veterans to military personnel who didn't serve in the Middle 
East and to civilians. 

The final report, due last fall, was delayed partly in light of new military 
information about the profuse spread of nerve gas after the American 
demolition of an Iraqi ammunition depot in 1991. 

Cameron won't divulge any of the study's findings until it is officially 
released in May. 

Since April 1995, military physicians at Canada's Gulf War clinic have 
diagnosed a battery of ordinary illnesses in Gulf War veterans, ranging from 
asthma to depression, says Lt.-Col. Scott. 

The majority have been successfully treated, he adds. 

"Two years ago, when I stopped counting, I had seen 200 different diagnoses," 
he says. 

Any health problems linked to service in the Gulf are, in the majority of 
cases, psychological in origin, he says. 

"We agree with five independent inquiries that say the etiology of those, in 
most cases, is the stresses of war," he says. "Every conflict we go to, we 
see these sort of things." 

He says British soldiers from the First World War suffered fatigue, disrupted 
sleep, joint pain, and memory problems. So did soldiers from the Second World 
War, "and they were diagnosed with something called ...combat stress 
syndrome." 

He says anxiety is a persistent problem among Gulf War veterans because of 
ongoing media coverage of the so-called Gulf war syndrome. "They are scared 
by what they see," he says. 

But the Riordons and Richard say it's that "all in your head" attitude that 
has scared veterans away from the Gulf War clinic. Many don't trust military 
doctors. 

"Anything to do medically with any Gulf War veteran (should be) out of the 
hands of government," Richard says, and in the hands of civilian specialists. 

Terry Riordon repeatedly complained of his symptoms to military doctors 
following his return from the Gulf. 

His military medical files, which he recently obtained under Access to 
Information, show a diagnosis by military doctors of Gulf War Syndrome, as 
well as asthma and depression. 

But he was never informed of the diagnosis. Nor did he receive treatment. 

After Susan lobbied National Defence, he was admitted to the Gulf War clinic 
in Ottawa. 

Doctors there diagnosed him with epilepsy, and prescribed epilepsy 
medication. 

Later, tests by civilian neurologists in Halifax showed the diagnosis was 
wrong. 

"When (the military) told us he had epilepsy, we moved to Yarmouth - into a 
house which is not medically suitable for my husband and into a community 
that cannot support us medically," Susan says. 

Cameron says the military can't comment on specific cases, but he insists 
it's doing its best to help veterans. 

"We are offering to anybody that feels they have a health problem as a result 
of their service in the Gulf...a full assessment at our clinic and the best 
medical care that is available in Canada today," he says. 

The military is also searching for better ways to help veterans, Cameron 
says. 

"There is a study ongoing right now on how best to look after people who have 
suffered injuries and health problems on military deployments." 

THIS AFTERNOON Susan Riordon has to coax Terry awake. 

Today is one of his better days. He only has a bad headache and is wobbly on 
his feet. 

Bald with a greying beard, Terry thumbs through a copy of his old military 
passport. It says his eyes are hazel,but now they are light blue. 

His face twitches as he talks. "They changed color when I returned from the 
Gulf," he says. "It's like my whole body chemistry has changed." 

Like Richard, he suspects his illnesses are due to vaccines and other 
chemical exposures. 

He remembers getting 12 injections at CFB Stadacona before he left for the 
Gulf though his medical file mentions only three. 

As a veteran of overseas assignments since 1972, he says the theory that vets 
are suffering war stress "is a pile of crap." 

An adequate disability pension would allow the Riordons to get homecare and 
buy prescribed drugs. 

But what Terry wants most is to be well again. 

"By the second day of one of my headaches, I want to blow my head off because 
it's just so excruciating. ...I won't carry on like this for a number of 
years. 

"You get to a point where obviously enough is enough, and I'll end it."