fw: THE WAR AGAINST OURSELVES

[Guest guest]

Almost unbelievable - this makes Agent Orange seem rather benign in comparison.

note: DU = depleted uranium

from:

http://www.futurenet.org/25environmentandhealth/rokke.htm

THE WAR AGAINST OURSELVES

An Interview with Major Doug Rokke

Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally

trained as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he

was assigned to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear,

biological, and chemical warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he

experienced has made him a passionate voice for peace,

traveling the country to speak out. The following interview was

conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny

, supplemented with questions from YES! editors.

(EXCERPT FROM DR. ROKKE'S INTERVIEW: " We also bombarded Vieques,

Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for the war in Kosovo. That's

affecting American citizens on American territory. When I tried to

activate our team from the Department of Defense responsible for

radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I

tried to activate medical care, I was told no.)

QUESTION : Any viewer who saw the war on television had the

impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and

soldiers coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate

picture?

ROKKE : At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back

to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty

count of 760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the

casualty rate now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30

percent. Of those stationed in the theater, including after the

conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability, according to a

Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10, 2002.

Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium

munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.

We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium

dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination,

and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that's struck

with uranium munitions. That's thousands upon thousands of

individuals, but not only US troops. You should provide medical

care not only for the enemy soldiers but for the Iraqi women and

children affected, and clean up all of the contamination in Iraq.

And it's not just children in Iraq. It's children born to

soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they

were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If

you've got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up.

So when the children were conceived -- the alpha particles

cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that

everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who

served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a

child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times

as likely.

Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served

in Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army

Reserves. Now you're going around the country speaking about

the dangers of depleted uranium (DU). What made you decide

you had to speak publicly about DU?

ROKKE: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend

Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care,

and he died. set up the medical evacuation communication

system for the entire theater. Then he got contaminated doing

the work.

and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian

world, the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got

the order that sent him to war. We were both activated together.

I was given the assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and

chemical warfare and make sure soldiers came back alive and

safe. I take it seriously. I was sent to the Gulf with this

instruction: Bring 'em back alive. Clear as could be. But when

I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup

procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing

happened.

More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly

fire accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on

and entered tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and

gathering souvenirs to take home. They didn't know about the

hazards.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10

pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium,

neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat

on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of

its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it's like a firestorm

inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous

burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.

The US military decided to blow up Saddam's chemical, biological,

and radiological stockpiles in place, which released the

contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the

whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological

monitors were going off all over the place. We had all of the

various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents,

and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a

toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.

When we first got assigned to clean up the DU, and arrived in

northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours.

Respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started

almost immediately.

When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you

start breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the

pharynx, where the cancer started initially on the first guy. It

doesn't take a lot of time. I had a father and son working with

me. The father is already dead from lung cancer, and the sick

son is still denied medical care.

Q: Did you suspect what was happening?

ROKKE: We didn't know anything about DU when the Gulf War

started. As a warrior, you're listening to your leaders, and

they're saying there are no health effects from the DU. But, as

we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in

physics and our engineering -- I was a professor of

environmental science and engineering -- you learn rapidly that

what they're telling you doesn't agree with what you know and

observe.

In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick.

Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things

were starting to show up.

Q: Why didn't you go to the VA with a medical complaint?

ROKKE: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn't

file. You have to have the information that connects your

exposure to your service before you go to the VA. The VA

obviously wasn't going to take care of me, so I went to my

private physician. We had no idea what it was, but so many

good people were coming back sick.

They didn't do tests on me or my team members. According to

the Department of Defense's own guidelines put out in 1992,

any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium

per day should result in immediate medical testing, and when you

get up to 250 micrograms of total uranium excreted per day,

you're supposed to be under continuous medical care.

Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay

on me in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted

Uranium Project for the Department of Defense. My excretion

rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day. My level was

5 to 6 times beyond the level that requires continuous medical

care.

But they didn't tell me for two and a half years.

Q: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?

ROKKE: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When

uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium

oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place.

This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets in the

body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes

into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction

stays -- in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and

the particulates destroy the lungs.

Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting

called up right now -- the ones being shipped to the vicinity of

what may be the next Gulf War?

ROKKE: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I

developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has

been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute

program that's full of distortions. It doesn't deal with the

reality of uranium munitions.

The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office

verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits

leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said

the defects can be fixed with duct tape.

Q: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment

and training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic

weapon, DU, who can speak up?

ROKKE : Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent,

aunt and uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these

official government reports and force the military to ensure

that our troops have adequate equipment and adequate training.

If we don't take care of our American veterans after a war, as

happened with the Gulf War, and now we're about ready to send

them into a war again -- we can't do it. We can't do it. It's a

crime against God. It's a crime against humanity to use uranium

munitions in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the

consequences of war.

These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium

238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the

place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation

for the war in Kosovo. That's affecting American citizens on

American territory. When I tried to activate our team from the

Department of Defense responsible for radiological safety and

DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I tried to activate

medical care, I was told no.

The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with

the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in

war, because I'm a warrior. What I saw as director of the

project,

doing the research, and working with my own medical conditions

and everybody else's, led me to one conclusion: uranium

munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and

medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the US or

the Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but

for the American citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq,

of Okinawa, of Scotland, of Indiana, of land, and now

Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Q: If your information got out widely, do you think there's a

possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to

refuse?

ROKKE: If you're going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you

know you're going to wear gas masks and chemical protective

suits that leak, and you're not going to get any medical care

after you're exposed to all of these things, would you go?

Suppose they gave a war and nobody came. You've got to start

peace sometime.

Q: It does sound remarkable, for someone who has been in the

military for 35 years, to be talking about when peace should

begin.

ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I'm

reminded that these religions say, " And a child will lead us to

peace. " But if we contaminate the environment, where will the

child come from? The children won't be there. War has become

obsolete, because we can't deal with the consequences on our

warriors or the environment, but more important, on the

noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the

contamination and the health effects of war can't be cleaned

up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can't be

given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side

or to the civilians affected, then it's time for peace.