Look what we're doing to our kids who...

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

...volunteer to serve their country:

---SNIP---

Modern wars have produced a number of specific medical complaints, ranging from “Gulf War Syndrome” - a group of immune disorders and cancers whose connection to service in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict is being studied - to the long-term effects of a defoliant, Agent Orange, for which some Vietnam veterans obtained a settlement in 1984.

While their causes can’t be pinpointed definitively, some soldiers who have avoided being killed or wounded in the current Iraq conflict are returning to America to find they have debilitating illnesses or cancers that they suspect are related to battlefield conditions, whether it is the depleted uranium used in projectiles, the remains of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, or the smoke from burning oil wells.

An Army chaplain, Captain Fran Stuart of the 101st Airborne was based in Mosul, Iraq, where “Shock and Awe” bombings occurred, for a year beginning in March 2003. In March 2006, the 40-year-old chaplain - who is this reporter’s sister - was diagnosed with a rare condition only seen in teenage girls: Stage IV dysgerminoma, an ovarian germ cell cancer. She was flown from Germany to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where doctors removed a volleyball-sized tumor from her abdomen and she faced daily battles with the side effects of an aggressive chemotherapy regimen - 35 rounds to date.

“My body isn’t mine anymore. I can feel the other tumors inside of me. I look like a monster,” Captain Stuart said last May as patches of her strawberry blond hair fell out. . . .

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/06/3010/

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

1. From the comments you can find by scrolling down...

...below this piece at the commondreams.org site:

This was written in February, 2003 Reprinted by permission

Depleted Uranium
by
Steve Osborn

Depleted Uranium, the new panacea
The Arms Maker’s choice with a half-life of only 4.5 billion years.
Workers in DU must wear exposure suits and respirators
Just a creative use of atomic leftovers.

Dense, hard, it punches through armor like tissue,
Vaporizes and fragments into dust and tiny chunks.
Dust to be breathed and chunks to be imbedded
As shrapnel or become buried in earth.

Battle tested in Desert Storm and Kosovo,
Now everyone is making them, and selling them,
To armies around the globe, eager for the latest thing.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi desert and Kosovo are laden with tons.

Pay no attention to the sick and the dying.
The Government says it is anything but DU.
Agent Orange was all in the mind, too.
Birth defects and cancer are coincidence in Govspeak.

A hundred or a thousand years from now,
When Hussein and Imperial America are long forgotten,
Or are but spooky tales told around the campfire,
As a new civilization tries to grow.

Peasants, trying to coax food from the ground will stir up clouds of dust.
They, their children and their animals will slowly sicken and die,
And they will know not why.
Just collateral damage from a weapon long ago.

19 February 2003

I think of Pete Seeger’s “Where have all the Flowers Gone?”

“When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”

[zabet]

2. Oddly enough,

I just read a bunch of stuff recently on depleted uranium.
Horrifying. The birth defects....
It is just too awful to even wrap my mind around.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

3. We've turned much of Iraq...

...into a toxic wasteland: