Just months after the war in the Persian Gulf ended in 1991, veterans began reporting an alarmingly consistent yet frustratingly unspecific range of ailments: headaches, tiredness, muscle and joint pain, memory loss, depression. Five years later, there is still no scientific consensus that they constitute an identifiable Gulf War syndrome, let alone agreement on a possible cause. In 1996, however, the report that at least some vets might have been exposed to nerve gas during the war suggested that there might be substance to the notion of chemically induced illness.
In September, the Pentagon announced that some 5,000 American soldiers may have been exposed to mustard gas and sarin gas in March 1991, when the Army’s 37th Engineer Battalion destroyed an ammunitions depot in southern Iraq. Only 150 soldiers or so carried out the destruction, but many thousands more may have been close enough to suffer low-level exposure to the ...
