Subject: THE WAR AGAINST OURSELVES An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
THE WAR AGAINST OURSELVES
An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
FutureNet / Yes!
http://www.futurenet.org/25environmentandhealth/rokke.htm
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:
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/
THE NATIONAL GULF WAR RESOURCE CENTER:
http://www.ngwrc.org
VETERANS FOR COMMON SENSE:
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org
Sunny Miller's interview was originally broadcast on WMFO
(Boston) in November 2002 and is available for re-broadcast at:
http://www.traprockpeace.org
