Gulf War exposure to depleted uranium maimed front-line troops while rear units stayed healthy

Evidence

Our second guide, traveling down that same road that very week, is a woman named Carol Picou, who ventured there in a very different capacity. First Sgt. Picou was serving as a combat support Army nurse working with a mobile hospital unit. A seventeen-year veteran of the U.S. military, she helped open a field hospital alongside the highway and for fifteen grueling days treated the injured and retrieved the Iraqi and Bedouin dead, clambering in out of those same incinerated tanks that for Kelly marked his sense of an ending. Within days of her departure from this scene, Picou’s skin starting to erupt in black spots; soon she lost control of her bladder and her bowels. She came to depend permanently on a catheter and diapers. After her return to America, over the months and years that followed, she developed thyroid problems and squamous cancer cells in her uterus; she developed immunological dysfunction and encephalopathy. Three years after her stint on the Highway of Death, tests found dangerously elevated levels of uranium in her urine. Not until a barrage of afflictions had jeopardized her life did Picou first heard the phrase “depleted uranium” and begin to learn of the threat its residues could pose. … Picou’s unit included 300 troops. Of those, 150 worked along the front line on the Highway of Death; the other 150 remained in the rear. By 1996, five years after the Gulf War’s official end, of the 150 members of Picou’s unit who worked on the Highway of Death forty were seriously ill and six had died. By contrast, the 150 who had stayed back from the front line had remained healthy. On learning that some returning veterans had started to father or conceive children missing an eye or an ear or a thyroid gland, that children were being born with flippers instead of arms, Picou, who had done so much to heal war’s casualties, decided to have her tubes tied. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 602

Categorization

• XREF: The nurse-operated field hospital as site of chronic contamination recall ch. 42’s ‘precision-warfare rhetoric masks long-term toxic deaths’ and the Bhopal/Chernobyl exposure mechanics.
• SHARE: The quasi-experimental contrast — 150 exposed (40 ill, 6 dead) vs 150 unexposed (all healthy) — is a perfect anecdote for someone teaching about dose-response and occupational cohorts.