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This article appears in YES! magazine http://www.yesmagazine.org.
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The War Against Ourselves
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.
For more information on DU, see the WISE Uranium Project,
www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/; the National Gulf War Resource Center,
www.ngwrc.org; or Veterans for Common Sense, www.veteransforcommonsense.org.
Sunny Miller's interview was originally broadcast on WMFO (Boston) in November
2002 and is available for re-broadcast at www.traprockpeace.org.