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popularmilitary.com Chemical Weapons and WMDs in Iraq
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“I was amazed I was never told about M-110 rounds before I got there,” Ismay says, referring to the chemical artillery rounds manufactured to produce a toxic effect on personnel and to contaminate habitable areas. “I never heard about guys who got hit by mustard and sarin.”
As a U.S. Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, Ismay spent a lot of time thinking about the improvised explosives killing coalition troops. He put in long hours at operations centers, studying reports and looking for patterns set by insurgent bomb-makers to help soldiers find IEDs with their eyes and not their bodies. Chemical weapons like nerve agents and mustard were an afterthought when improvised explosives were the number-one killer of troops in Iraq. Yet at the same time, Iraqi and American soldiers recovered thousands of chemical munitions mostly in secret for three years before Ismay deployed to Iraq, leaving his troops and countless others to a grim lottery of sorting through damaged shells that might have led to paralysis by sharing the same air.
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Ismay couldn’t satisfy what he calls a
“morbid curiosity” about the origins of the chemical weapons found in
Iraq. His research stalled due to lack of evidence and Pentagon
documentation, and he put his work in a drawer until Chivers came to him
on the same subject. Chivers was following murmurs that chemical
weapons designed by the West in the 1940s and used in the Iran-Iraq War
were the same munitions that Americans and Iraqis were pulling out of
weapons caches IED emplacements as recent as 2011.
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“This was
basically an arms trade story,” Chivers says. Initially, Pentagon
officials were tin-eared to their requests on the types of chemical
weapons injuring U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, and no one would go on
record.
“As the number of victims grew, as the number of collected
munitions hit four figures, we realized we had a different story,”
Chivers says. It was no longer about the weapons. It was now about the
men wounded by them. All they had to do was listen to their stories.
Of
all the occupations wary of outsiders, combat troops—men and women in
an insular, competitive, and poorly understood culture—might be the most
guarded. It’s an undeniable hurdle confronting any journalist who must
use veterans as sources and guides through complex stories.
Chivers’
stature as one of the world’s top conflict reporters helped overcome
that challenge. His reporting has even landed him on Pulitzer-winning
teams at the New York Times. But a veteran doesn’t see
journalistic accolades on Chivers’ sleeve when they meet him. They see
his closely cropped hair and a Marine officer’s directness.
“Being
a veteran helped to get people to speak with us candidly [about the
story], and ask people to come forward, where there is a lot of
disincentive for them to trust us with their stories,” Chivers says. “I
have found time again that veterans talk to me because I was a Marine.”
The
veterans interviewed in the story were privately frustrated with their
experience but cautious of the media. Chivers communicated with them for
months before the story began to take shape. It could’ve been longer
without Chivers’ background and Ismay’s service in Iraq to boost their
bona fides.
“There was a level of comfort because you don’t ask
stupid questions,” Ismay says. “You don’t pity them, and you’re not
condescending.”
Ismay is quick to point out that this heightened
understanding is not uniquely imbued in veterans who become journalists,
artists, or anyone else responsible for crafting work from the human
condition. He cites Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau as a civilian with
immense understanding of war’s toll. Trudeau’s longtime character B.D. lost a leg in Iraq,
rehabilitated at Walter Reed and battled post-traumatic stress. Trudeau
never served a day in his life, yet he is as empathetic as he is
pacifistic.
But for those with military backgrounds covering those
who came after, is there a bias for covering those close to home? One
might expect proximity to a culture to cloud perceptions or downplay
institutional problems. Relatively few former football players were
outspoken about domestic violence and brain injuries in the NFL until
the recent scandals, for instance.
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Past military experience gives
veteran-journalists more space and credibility to scrutinize, says Mac
Bishop (left), a former Marine who spent time as both an infantryman and a
Japanese translator. Bishop joined Ismay and Chivers on the story last
year, gathering interviews and acting as the videographer and
co-producer for the story’s accompanied documentary.
“I can be
very critical of someone in the military,” he says. “I couldn’t call out
my captain, but as a journalist, I’m not afraid to challenge them when
something that doesn’t sound right to me.”
The military is a
reflection of society, Bishop says, where race and socio-economic
diversity is more evenly distributed than he encountered in and out of
college. But the larger population doesn’t understand that, he says. The
public perception of the military and veterans is often a binary one:
you’re either the unstable, PTSD-addled survivor, or you’re the
celebrated hero invited to sing ‘God Bless America’ at the World Series.
That kind of simplification may bleed into reporting,
which can be damaging given journalism’s role in shaping public
opinion. But journalists are no more or less susceptible to view the
military as an unknowable monolith—it’s just easier to identify. Bishop
didn’t need to gain situational awareness or work through misconceptions
when it came to working on military and veteran-related stories. He
arrived ready-made.
“The military doesn’t have any mystery for
me,” he says. “So I can say, ‘Look, we served at the same time. I’m not
pretending I’m special, but I don’t think you’re special either.’”
Prior
military service as a newsroom asset doesn't extend only to covering
military and veteran issues. Journalism is about people at its
foundation, and a wide breadth of exposure in the Marines has served
Bishop well for stories on economics as much as chemical weapon
injuries.
"Living beside, eating with and relying on people with
upbringings different from my own was an education in itself, and
strengthened my ability to quickly understand others and their
motivations," he says. "I can think of few fundamental skills more
valuable in a reporter."
The three veterans—Bishop, Ismay, and
Chivers—met with troops wounded by weapons the public didn’t know were
there, who watched Purple Hearts stripped off their chest, and came home
to a VA system skeptical of their undocumented injuries when the world
still believed no chemical weapons were found in Iraq. It wasn’t long
before a spirit of social justice guided them.
“I put plenty of my
Marines in the ground, whether that was in training accidents, drunk
driving, all kinds of things,” Bishop says. “I thought, ‘These people
could have served under me. They could have been me.’”
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The
military is ostensibly egalitarian, but the hierarchy holds a
fundamental bias toward legitimacy and protection for the top, sometimes
at the expense for those at the bottom. Chivers knows the bureaucracy
from both ends and sees his work on this story as a “social leveling”
for those caught on the damaging side of bureaucratic self-protection.
“When
we sit down and listen, a specialist or a sergeant or a captain has as
much and arguably more weight at our table then generals or senior
staff, many of whom on this story were bullshitting us, where the
rank-and-file—the guys who were in harm's way—were not,” he says.
“We’re
not stuck in the rank structure anymore,” Chivers adds, “and we can
stand against it with a certain knowing attitude and look at how these
people have suffered with a particular understanding eye.”
Ismay
agrees. He has seen first-hand how information gets squelched. He knows
it’s preventable—a function of bad leaders who distance themselves from
accountability and proactive decisions. “Having a Purple Heart taken
away is disrespectful,” he says. There’s a complete lack of empathy
among those leaders. And that’s a problem for me.”
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Perhaps only a
former EOD technician could have concluded that the blame didn’t lie
with incompetency at the ground level. “I’m trained to investigate when
things go wrong. And these guys didn’t screw up,” Ismay says. “They were
professionals who got wounded. They were wounded doing a job, in the
line of duty.”
That quiet sacrifice is now a step closer to being fully recognized. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in response to the story,
has ordered all troops exposed to chemical weapons to undergo testing
and long-term monitoring, along with a review of how the fiasco went on
for so long out of the public view.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/veterans-iraq-war-untold-story/382558/
'I admit I am Happy to be a part of spreading this story for all or most to see (please share so others can as well), too often the reality of PTSD and chemical weapons on the front have been overlooked, not so much by the families who have returning Loved Ones, but by the people who sent them there to begin with...'
