Melissa Sterry is a veteran of the Gulf War. While deployed in Iraq, she was working to put tanks, armored vehicles and nearly every other type of vehicle used by ground forces away into storage. Since she returned, she has suffered from myriad of symptoms resembling those of the hibakusha - the Japanese word for radiation victim, coined after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
She is sick with Gulf War Syndrome, an illness with numerous possible causes and even more symptoms. She has suffered through three heart attacks and two heart surgeries as well as chronic fatigue syndrome caused by her exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and she has had to fight the government for disability since she filed for it in 1995. She is by no means alone.
By current estimates, 300,000 Gulf War veterans are on permanent disability and have had to fight to gain and keep it. Since the end of the war, in which we lost 165 troops during combat operations, unofficial estimates place the death toll at 40,000 out of 694,000 deployed troops that have died of Gulf War Syndrome. The National Vital Statistics Report predicts that by 2013, 80,000 to 100,000 veterans will have died.
No comments:
Post a Comment