(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

Those are the bottles of medicine that Herbert Reed, an Iraqi war veteran, has to take every day to feel less than okay. His story, along with those of other veterans, is a horrifying tale of the effects that depleted uranium – a weapon that the United States has been using in Iraq during our occupation – is having on some of our soldiers who make it home alive.

It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills — morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

Reed has several doctors caring for him, and yet none of them can tell him what is wrong with him. The Pentagon has refused to acknowledge that it might be the effects of depleted uranium. These brave men and women have managed to survive their tours of duty, but they come home to being shells of themselves, a terrifying picture of the effects of radioactive weaponry that our army has been all too willing to use in Iraq – not only in the current conflict, but also in the first Gulf War as well.
So what is depleted uranium? Although it sounds like it is probably a weakened version of the radioactive element uranium, the name deceptively covers up the true nature of the material.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

A half-life of 4.5 billion years for depleted uranium to decay to half of its current radioactivity – that’s about as old as the planet Earth itself. The fact that we have so much of it sitting around as waste makes one wonder where we’re going to store all of it. However, we’ve been using it in weaponry. From the Wikipedia entry on the chemical:

Depleted uranium is very dense; at 19050 kg/m³, it is 70% denser than lead. Thus a given weight of it has a smaller diameter than an equivalent lead projectile, with less aerodynamic drag and deeper penetration due to a higher pressure at point of impact. DU projectile ordnance is often incendiary because of its pyrophoric property.

Because of its high density, depleted uranium can also be used in tank armor, sandwiched between sheets of steel armor plate. For instance, some late-production M1A1HA and M1A2 Abrams tanks built after 1998 have DU reinforcement as part of its armor plating in the front of the hull and the front of the turret and there is a program to upgrade the rest.

In using depleted uranium in the army, we’ve exponentially increased the possibility that our soldiers will be exposed to poisonous fumes and gases that will harm them greatly. However, the effects of the chemical are downplayed by official organizations. The World Health Organization does a deceptive job of ensuring that the effects of exposure to depleted uranium really aren’t that bad. What’s worse, though, is the description on an official military FAQ on depleted uranium.

A common misconception is that radiation is depleted uranium’s primary hazard. This is not the case under most battlefield exposure scenarios. Depleted uranium is approximately 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium. Depleted uranium emits alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays. Alpha particles, the primary radiation type produced by depleted uranium, are blocked by skin, while beta particles are blocked by the boots and battle dress utility uniform (BDUs) typically worn by service members. While gamma rays are a form of highly-penetrating energy , the amount of gamma radiation emitted by depleted uranium is very low. Thus, depleted uranium does not significantly add to the background radiation that we encounter every day.

When fired, or after “cooking off” in fires or explosions, the exposed depleted uranium rod poses an extremely low radiological threat as long as it remains outside the body. Taken into the body via metal fragments or dust-like particles, depleted uranium may pose a long-term health hazard to personnel if the amount is large. However, the amount which remains in the body depends on a number of factors, including the amount inhaled or ingested, the particle size and the ability of the particles to dissolve in body fluids.

Well, shit. I’m not quite sure how assuring people that it’s 40% less radioactive will change the fact that it’s still radioactive and will lead to birth defects for those who have been exposed. Playing down the amount that can enter a body seems rather trivial as well, when one reads on about how Reed was exposed to depleted uranium. It’s another sad example of how our troops don’t have the necessary equipment in the field to know what areas are safe for them to go in. Instead, they were left to find the answers for themselves after the fact…on the Internet.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”

What’s surprising is that after seeing the effects (warning: link contains graphic photographs) of what depleted uranium did to innocent civilians – particularly children – after the first Gulf War, we used it again this time around. An examination of Iraq before the invasion began a few months later revealed the deadly effects of depleted uranium on a civilian population who had committed no crime.

The photos represent the surge in birth defects — in 1989 there were 11 per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000 births — that even before they heard about DU, had doctors in southern Iraq making comparisons to the birth defects that followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.

There were photos of infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines, and the list of deformities went on and on. There also were photos of cancer patients.

Then there is the effect on our own soldiers. The Gulf War Syndrome, a condition describing an unknown illness that soldiers of the conflict in the early 1990s have. Many theories have been postulated as to what could cause the health problems of the thousands of soldiers (of the nearly 700,000 US soldiers who fought in Desert Storm, about 150,000 have been diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome [warning: link contains graphic photographs]), but one of the prominent theories that has been backed is that depleted uranium is responsible. As the Wikipedia entry on GFS notes, there is little knowledge about the amount of exposure to the chemical, even though the US and its coalition allies fired off 286 tons of depleted uranium-infused armaments in 1991, and an additional 130 tons in 2003. It’s going to take a long time to clean up the radioactive ‘hot spots’ in Iraq:

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

In the days before Shock and Awe would mark the beginning of an unneeded conflict, Iraqi officials were begging the US and its allies to not use munitions with depleted uranium, citing the health effects that had been observed in the country. Given our wide array of weaponry – and the respective weakness of the Iraqi army – one would think that it’s a reasonable request. Sparing civilians from a creeping horror such as depleted uranium would probably serve to at least marginally improve our standing within the country. Instead, we ignored the facts once again.

A United States defence official has said moves to ban depleted uranium ammunition are just an attempt by America’s enemies to blunt its military might.

Colonel James Naughton of US Army Materiel Command said Iraqi complaints about depleted uranium (DU) shells had no medical basis.

“They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them,” he told a Pentagon briefing.

[…]

“Who’s asking the question? The Iraqis tell us ‘terrible things happened to our people because you used it last time’.

“Why do they want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them, OK?”

Not only has our government shown a disregard for the possible effects on Iraqi civilians that using chemical weapons would have, but they haven’t been taking care of our soldiers, either. Veterans like Herbert Reed deserve an answer as to what has happened to them. It’s the least they deserve, and it can help soldiers who are still fighting in the country avoid debilitation from the inhalation of depleted uranium. Instead, the search for the truth, to what should be no one’s surprise, is being bogged down by bureaucracy:

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

[…]

Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

“Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal,” stated its December 2005 report. “Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective.”

It’s fair enough to say that soldiers coming home with the same symptoms as Reed probably have Gulf War Syndrome. Efforts have been made during the current session of Congress to specifically study the effects of depleted uranium. It’d certainly be a step forward from what we know today about the ailments our soldiers face. However, the GOP leaders of Congress haven’t bothered taking up the bills, introduced by Democratic politicians. The party that claims to be strong on national security, as has been par for it, abandons its duty to take care of those who have fought for their country, regardless of the nature of the conflict. Having abandoned our moral obligation to care for soldiers who have endured the horror of war, they are left to find our what’s wrong with them on their own.

Now 29, [Army artillery scout Raphael Naboa] had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke — one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

“Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it,” he said. “Except I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

“A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles.”

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed’s, is self-taught from the Internet.

Our troops deserve better than this. We need to bring our troops home as quickly as possible, but once they get home, it is our moral imperative to give them the best care that they can get – and to give them the answers they seek, no matter how ugly the truth may be. It’s time we owned up to the inconvenient facts that surround depleted uranium: it is a radioactive chemical weapon that has turned sections of Iraq into an uninhabitable hot spot and has caused unimaginable human suffering for innocent civilians and for our own soldiers.