Subject: Fw: The War on Ourselves 
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 19:16:18 -0800


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.



Subject: The War on Ourselves






>Subject: The War on Ourselves
>Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:03:05 +0000
>
>An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
>
>Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as
>a
>forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to
>prepare
>soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare,
>and sent
>to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a passionate voice for
>peace,
>traveling the country to speak out. The following interview was
>conducted
>by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny Miller,
>supplemented
>with questions from YES! editors.
>
>QUESTION: Any viewer who saw the war on television had the
>impression this
>was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back
>relatively
>unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?
>
>ROKKE: At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the
>United
>States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760:
>294 dead,
>a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now for Gulf
>War
>veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in the
>theater,
>including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability,
>according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10,
>2002.
>
>Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium
>munitions
>friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.
>
>We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust,
>anybody
>working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a
>vehicle,
>structure, or building that's struck with uranium munitions. That's
>thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops. You
>should
>provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers but for the
>Iraqi
>women and children affected, and clean up all of the contamination
>in Iraq.
>
>And it's not just children in Iraq. It's children born to soldiers
>after
>they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding
>uranium
>excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you've got uranium in the
>semen,
>the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived-the
>alpha
>particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that
>everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who
>served in
>the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a
>birth
>defect and female soldiers almost three times as likely.
>
>Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in
>Vietnam as
>a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves. Now you're
>going
>around the country speaking about the dangers of depleted uranium
>(DU).
>What made you decide you had to speak publicly about DU?
>
>ROKKE: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend John
>Sitton
>was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he died. John
>set up
>the medical evacuation communication system for the entire theater.
>Then he
>got contaminated doing the work.
>
>John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world,
>the
>military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order
>that
>sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the
>assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and
>make sure
>soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent
>to the
>Gulf with this instruction: Bring 'em back alive. Clear as could be.
>But
>when I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup
>procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing happened.
>
>More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly fire
>accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and
>entered tanks
>that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering souvenirs to
>take
>home. They didn't know about the hazards.
>
>DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of
>solid
>uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is
>pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank
>because
>of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it's
>like a
>firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous
>burns,
>tremendous injuries. It was devastating.
>
>The US military decided to blow up Saddam's chemical, biological,
>and
>radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination
>back on
>the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical
>agent
>detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the
>place. We
>had all of the various nerve agents. We think there were biological
>agents,
>and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic
>wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.
>
>When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in
>northern Saudi
>Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours. Respiratory
>problems,
>rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost immediately.
>
>When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you start
>breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx,
>where the
>cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn't take a lot of
>time. I
>had a father and son working with me. The father is already dead
>from lung
>cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.
>
>Q: Did you suspect what was happening?
>
>ROKKE: We didn't know anything about DU when the Gulf War started.
>As a
>warrior, you're listening to your leaders, and they're saying there
>are no
>health effects from the DU. But, as we started to study this, to go
>back to
>what we learned in physics and our engineering-I was a professor of
>environmental science and engineering-you learn rapidly that what
>they're
>telling you doesn't agree with what you know and observe.
>
>In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick.
>Respiratory
>problems and the rashes and neurological things were starting to
>show up.
>
>Q: Why didn't you go to the VA with a medical complaint?
>
>ROKKE: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn't
>file. You
>have to have the information that connects your exposure to your
>service
>before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn't going to take care
>of me,
>so I went to my private physician. We had no idea what it was, but
>so many
>good people were coming back sick.
>
>They didn't do tests on me or my team members. According to the
>Department
>of Defense's own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion level in
>the
>urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in
>immediate
>medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms of total
>uranium
>excreted per day, you're supposed to be under continuous medical
>care.
>
>Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay on me
>in
>November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project
>for the
>Department of Defense. My excretion rate was approximately 1500
>micrograms
>per day. My level was 5 to 6 times beyond the level that requires
>continuous medical care.
>
>But they didn't tell me for two and a half years.
>
>Q: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?
>
>ROKKE: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When uranium
>impacts
>any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of
>uranium
>explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a
>wound.
>Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which
>means
>it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble
>fraction stays-in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and
>the
>particulates destroy the lungs.
>
>Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting called
>up
>right now-the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what may be the
>next
>Gulf War?
>
>ROKKE: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed
>a
>40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved.
>They
>turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that's full of
>distortions. It
>doesn't deal with the reality of uranium munitions.
>
>The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified
>that the
>gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak. Unbelievably,
>Defense
>Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with
>duct tape.
>
>Q: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment and
>training
>that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon, DU, who can
>speak
>up?
>
>ROKKE: Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent, aunt
>and
>uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these official
>government
>reports and force the military to ensure that our troops have
>adequate
>equipment and adequate training. If we don't take care of our
>American
>veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War, and now we're
>about
>ready to send them into a war again-we can't do it. We can't do it.
>It's a
>crime against God. It's a crime against humanity to use uranium
>munitions
>in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the consequences of war.
>
>These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238
>is 4.5
>billion years. And we left over
>320 tons all over the place in Iraq.
>
>We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for
>the war
>in Kosovo. That's affecting American citizens on American territory.
>When I
>tried to activate our team from the Department of Defense
>responsible for
>radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I
>tried
>to activate medical care, I was told no.
>
>The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the
>total
>intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because
>I'm a
>warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the research
>and
>working with my own medical conditions and everybody else's, led me
>to one
>conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for
>eternity,
>and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the US or
>the
>Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for the
>American
>citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of
>Scotland, of
>Indiana, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.
>
>Q: If your information got out widely, do you think there's a
>possibility
>that the families of those soldiers would beg them to refuse?
>
>ROKKE: If you're going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you
>know
>you're going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that
>leak, and
>you're not going to get any medical care after you're exposed to all
>of
>these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.
>You've
>got to start peace sometime.
>
>Q: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the military
>for 35
>years to be talking about when peace should begin.
>
>ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I'm reminded
>that
>these religions say, "And a child will lead us to peace." But if we
>contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The
>children won't be there. War has become obsolete, because we can't
>deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but
>more important, on the
>noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination
>and the
>health effects of war can't be cleaned up because of the weapons you
>use,
>and medical care can't be given to the soldiers who participated in
>the war
>on either side or to the civilians affected, then it's time for
>peace.
>
>
>
>
>
>


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