"When people see her they say, 'What happened to your baby?'"

Father Exposed To "Dicey" Contaminants, Including Depleted Uranium While In Army's 1st Cavalry Division

NOTE: See special Cutting Edge report at end of this article

Life Magazine

August 15, 2004

"Adults are worse than children as far as staring," says mom Shana.
Kennedi's dad, Darrell, tested positive for radiation exposure, but
unless his testes are dissected no link to her condition can be proved.
ea' Arnold was not born to a soldier, but she might as well have been:
Her father went to the Gulf as a civilian helicopter mechanic with the
Army's 1st Cavalry Division. On a Wednesday morning, Lea' lies naked in
her parents' bed, in a small house off a gravel road in Belton, Tex. A
nurse looms over her, brandishing a plastic hose.
"Don't hurt me," wails Lea.
"I'm not going to hurt you, sweetie," says the nurse. "You need to
peepee."

As the nurse administers the catheter, Lisa Arnold--a sturdy woman who
carries her sadness on broad shoulders--tells the story of her
daughter's birth. "The doctor said, 'Well, she's got a little problem
with her back.' They let me hold her for a minute, and then they took
her to intensive care." Lea' had spina bifida, a split in the backbone
that causes paralysis and hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. She
needed surgery to remove three vertebrae. "They told us that if she
lived the next 36 hours, she'd have a pretty good chance of surviving.
Those 36 hours . . . it's kind of indescribable what that's like."
Three years later, Lea' has grown into a redhead like her mother, with
the haunted face of a medieval martyr. She cannot move her legs or roll
over. A shunt drains fluid from her skull.

"She tells me every night that she wants to walk," says Richard Arnold, a soft-spoken ex-Marine.
Richard, who had fathered two healthy children before he went to war,
was working for Lockheed in the Gulf. But he bunked in the desert with
the troops--and that meant swallowing, inhaling and otherwise absorbing
some very dicey stuff. According to a 1994 report by the General
Accounting Office, American soldiers were exposed to 21 potential
"reproductive toxicants," any of which might have harmed them as well as
their future children. They used diesel fuel to keep down sand. They
marched through smoke from burning oil wells. They doused themselves
with bug sprays. They handled a toxic nerve-gas decontaminant, ethylene
glycol monomethyl ether. They fired shells tipped with depleted uranium.

Other teratogens--materials that cause birth defects--may have been
present too. One possibility is that desert winds bore traces of Iraqi
poison gas.(POISON IN THE DESERT and POISON IN THE AIR)
Some physicians who have treated Gulf vets believe they may be suffering
from a general overload of chemical pollutants--and that their body
fluids are actually toxic. (Indeed, many veterans' wives are sick; a few
complain that their husbands' semen blisters their skin.) "It was a
toxic environment," says Dr. Charles Jackson, staff physician for the
Veterans Administration Medical Center in Tuskegee, Ala. Other doctors,
while agreeing that chemicals or radiation may have caused birth
defects, think the vets' ills came from a germ--an unknown Iraqi
biological warfare agent, perhaps, or some form of leishmaniasis, a
disease carried by sand flies.

Government scientists generally discount these theories. "The hard cold
facts" are simply not there, says Dr. Robert Roswell, executive director
of the Persian Gulf Veterans Coordinating Board. But one hypothesis
elicits even his respect. "The one argument that does deserve further
study [concerns] the combination of pyridostigmine bromide with
pesticides."

Pyridostigmine bromide--or PB--is a drug usually prescribed to sufferers
of myasthenia gravis, a degenerative nerve disease. But animal
experiments have shown that pretreatment with PB may also provide some
protection from the nerve gas soman. The U.S. military therefore gave
the drug to most Americans in the Gulf. Darrell Clark, for instance,
took it, and Richard Arnold--now racked with chronic joint
pain--probably did: "I took everything the First Cavalry took."

See Related Cutting Edge Report From Foreign Doctor Trained In Modern Desert Warfare -- Report originally posted in Newsletter081603

The body of every soldier in Iraq is now being assaulted by the following elements:

In the daily campaign in Iraq, soldiers are breathing in the toxic Depleted Uranium, and many of them are being constantly bitten by the local insects. These two elements join the toxic vaccine already in the body. Because of the unrelenting, searing heat, nearly every soldier is dehydrated to some degree, thus allowing this deadly combination of toxins to build up to dangerously concentrated levels. Further, this doctor related how American scientists keeping watch over the radioactive poisoning of the Pacific islands at which France and the United States conducted nuclear tests several decades ago, are constantly finding mutated organisms that have never been identified before! Uranium poisoning in our soldiers is very likely mutating with these other elements to create strange and deadly organisms for which the soldiers have not been prepared to face.

The way in which these five elements combine to make the solider sick, or to kill him, will vary widely with each soldier. The age of the soldier plays a part, as does the individual genetic code, as does the health of the immune system. Thus, soldiers will be getting sick at various points along the time spectrum. Further, the exact cause of death will vary so widely that it will be difficult to prove any single cause. Some soldiers will die of pneumonia, some of internal organ meltdown, some of apparent heart attack, and some will die of maladies perhaps not yet seen in medical science.

This high heat accelerates the process of getting sick tremendously. If our soldiers are already dying and/or getting sick at the rate of 5 per day, how long will it take to reach 50 per day, and then 100? At which point will the pressure build up about the true situation so that the news cannot be suppressed any longer?

The situation facing our troops in Iraq is simply unprecedented!