Warrior Pose (34 page)

I've joined a new church just two blocks away, only because it's closer and easier to get to. The pastor, Father David, is in his early forties, lean and wiry, with short, wispy brown hair and a glimmer in his eyes. He is as Irish as Father Joe, and as charismatic—always smiling and filled with energy. He comes to visit me at home once a week and prays for a healing. In the quiet moments I have to myself, I find I'm opening more to inner awareness, but not as a religion. To me, it's a spiritual awareness, a search for deeper meaning in my life, a way to try to cope with my dark emotions and accept that I probably have just a short time left on this Earth. But it's in its infancy, like a tiny seed sprouting beneath the soil trying to push through the crust of the hard earth and not making much progress.

The cycles of back pain and sickness are tormenting. The ice pick episodes strike periodically despite all the drugs, and the malaise I felt when I was diagnosed with cancer keeps returning, like a dark, malevolent presence invading my body again. It's not as intense as before, but it keeps hanging around and it scares me out of my wits. It's often hard to swallow and my throat sometimes bleeds. I can't keep my fingers off the tender nodes on my neck and am always pressing them, wondering if cancer is spreading through my body.

And I'm totally confused. Was there a screwup? Should I have had chemo? Two doctors say yes, but the book on Dr. Kourany's desk says it doesn't confer any survival benefits. I guess that means, like he said, it just slows things down. One thing seems certain: I don't have much time.
Two years
. I can't forget those words. I was
diagnosed in September of last year. That leaves me less than a year and a half to go.

“Pentagon Denies Claims of Gulf War Illness.” The story is buried in the back pages of
The New York Times
today. The article doesn't surprise me. I've long had a hunch that it might have been something I was exposed to in the Gulf that caused my cancer. Maybe some chemical weapon used by Saddam that no one ever discovered. As I dig into the article, I find out it wasn't Iraq that used these types of weapons; it was America.

More than a hundred thousand Gulf veterans are sick and almost ten thousand have died since the war, but it's being hushed up. After years of denial, the Department of Defense is finally admitting that U.S. air campaigns deliberately blew up large caches of weapons in Iraq, sending clouds of toxic debris toward its own ground troops. As I suspected, the article indicates that the MOPP gear, the masks, and the chemical uniforms that soldiers and war correspondents were issued were of poor quality and little use.

It gets worse. There was an invisible enemy on the battlefield: armor-piercing shells made with depleted uranium used in American tank, anti-aircraft, and antipersonnel artillery. Depleted uranium ordnance is denser than lead, pierces better, fragments more easily, and also bursts into flames. It was cheap for the Defense Department to obtain because it's a waste product of the nuclear-bomb program. It was highly effective, but it also filled the battlefields with toxic radiation that is carcinogenic. I remember peering into Iraqi tanks that were freshly punched full of holes from these shells. This must be what I breathed into my throat. Was it our own bomb attacks that made me, and thousands of soldiers, terminally ill? The thought enrages me.

I'm continuing to investigate the Gulf War Syndrome. I know it will not do anything to cure me, but I need to know the facts. After endless unanswered phone calls to numerous old sources, I finally reach a Marine general I became friends with during the war.

“I can't say anything on the record,” he tells me. “You can never use my name. I would have to deny we ever spoke.” He must protect his career. When I agree to these terms, he confirms my findings. Many of his soldiers became sick after the war. Several died.
He believes the depleted uranium played a major role. It's a moral dilemma for him and I can feel his distress.

“I wish I could bring back my men,” he says with remorse, “but I can't. That's all I can say. Good luck.”