Person of Interest | This G.I. Joe Struggles Daily With Gulf War Illness

— by Lin McNulty —

The first thing this 20-year-old soldier from Fort Bragg, North Carolina noticed was the smell, the overwhelming stench of human waste permeating the desert air as he stepped off the plane in Saudi Arabia in 1990.

His grandfather, a British soldier, was a World War II POW, and his father a veteran of the Vietnam War. Joe Morrison, now 46, had always wanted to be a soldier.

During his seven months of service during the Gulf War, he was assigned to a unit tasked with building roads into Iraq from Saudi Arabia. They carried in bridges meant to cross the Euphrates River. He recalls the experience of living in the desert during the winter rains; the sand became slick, it caked on everything, and was like “living in a four-inch lake,” he shudders. The temperature was 100-plus degrees in the day, and dropped to 50 degrees overnight.

The background noise was constant with the sounds of exploding bombs, chemical alarms, anti scud missiles, and/or exploding Patriot missiles as they worked a continual 12 hours on, 12 hours off for seven days a week. A brief respite for R&R (rest and relaxation?) was next to a water desalinization plant in Saudi that had been treated with a toxic anti-rusting agent that leached into the surrounding area.

War is a laboratory.

It might have been the mandatory medications he was ordered to take: Pyridostigmine bromide (PB), the anti-nerve agent pill prescribed every eight hours, used as a pretreatment to protect military personnel from death in an attack with the nerve agent soman; the anthrax vaccine to reduce the risk or progression of disease due to inhaled anthrax. It might have been the days spent in the burning Kuwaiti oil fields where the light of day was never seen through the black, acrid smoke. It might have been the depleted uranium, or the Iraqi bunker they blew up that was suspected to contain chemical weapons.

Any one of those toxins could be the source of his bone deterioration, his pervasive abdominal pain and bleeding. He walks with a cane now, as the bones in his feet fracture, heal, and fracture again, and again.

It’s commonly called Gulf War Syndrome, but that isn’t something the Veterans Administration (VA) acknowledges. They treat only symptoms rather than viewing these symptoms as a whole.

He doesn’t harbor any bad feelings. “It was as advertised,” he says. “I was well-trained, I did my job. I was a part of the machine.” Knowing what he knows now, however, that he is facing a lifetime of illness, he would not do it again.

The first thing he noticed, when stepping off the plane back home, was the smell of pine trees in the fresh, North Carolina air.