Have DU — Will Travel: Interview with Major Denise Nichols
‘We’re like little sheep, little lambs that didn’t know the truth.’
ICONOCLAST: What is the current status of individuals coming back from Iraq?
NICHOLS: They’re not getting tested for DU and they should be. There should be an organized approach that everybody gives urine samples as soon as they hit the ground back home. There should be an organization doing that across the board. It’s not happening. People are having to go to the states to at least get the opportunity for the National Guard, and that’s ridiculous. There needs to be an organized program. Every single one of them needs to be tested, whether they are National Guard, reserve, or active duty. Dr. (Henry) Dorochovich who was punished, also, who was part of Doug Rokke’s team needs to be the head person of the lab that ultimately does this. Our trust in the system, as currently set up, is not there because they don’t even take calls from the Gulf War vets that were tested for DU, as they call and try to tell them their health has changed. They are not actively tracking these people’s health even though they tested a small number. I say small in comparison to the numbers of us that served in the first Gulf War.
ICONOCLAST: They did about 200 out of thousands?
NICHOLS: Oh, yeah. We had 689,000 deployed. When I first started asking, I asked for heavy metal testing at the VA. They wouldn’t do it. I begged them. I said, "Come on. This might give us some answers of what’s going on." That was back in ’93-’94. It hasn’t changed one iota. They are passing bills in the states. It’s a shame because people are trying to do something productive, but I doubt that it will really change anything because there’s not an organized approach to getting everybody tested. And it shouldn’t just be if you think there’s a problem. No. There is a problem. Accept that there was DU used in theatre that we want to know just as much as the firefighters in New York want to know their health status. It should be open. It should be transparent. I’ve been in D.C. when Melissa McDermott presented. She wouldn’t address the questions from people that were there. She wouldn’t answer those. She brushed them off. So the transparency is not there.
ICONOCLAST: Is there a disconnect between the Congress and the Administration on this? This testing is required by law, is it not?
NICHOLS: By law it’s not. They say it’s available if they request it, and so many of them don’t understand. We’re like little sheep, little lambs that didn’t know the truth. I was over there and served on the border between Saudi and Iraq and I finally sent my urine off 10 years after to Dr. Dorochovich’s uranium metals project, and it came back with a trace. I was showing even that. They’re not even doing hair sampling, which would probably be cheaper and would show it right off the bat. They’re not making that information available to the troops. You know, here’s a hair sampling kit if you want to pay for it yourself. They’re not doing anything, nothing in an organized manner, and it’s because they don’t want to acknowledge what the truth and the hazards are. We now have three bills up there, but when the Democrats put it out the Republicans aren’t signing on. I’ve been pushing those three bills and telling people to send e-mails and write letters, call your Representatives, get them to sign on to these bills, show them that we are still alive out here and we want this done. There are three bills. If you go on <house.gov> and click on "thomas" and put in DU, they’ll pop up.
ICONOCLAST: Do you know what the thinking of the military brass is on DU?
NICHOLS: Basically, to not trigger any controversy.
ICONOCLAST: The reason for that would be…
NICHOLS: Let’s compare this to Agent Orange. Tactically DU works great, just like Agent Orange defoliated the triple canopy forest in Vietnam, cut down sniper attacks and all that. Okay. DU is a weapon that is very, very effective. They don’t want to give it up. When you’re fighting a war, you want the best, to protect lives in, but they don’t look at the long-term health effects. They never do. They never have. And until they learn that lesson, people need to keep speaking up and we need to keep educating and trying to get there. Everybody needs to be involved in bringing it up.
ICONOCLAST: Are you seeing a lot of soldiers in greater numbers with DU problems?
NICHOLS: I’ll tell you what’s going on right now. Gulf War vet have kind of gone quiet. They are trying to get the compensation if they haven’t. If they have gotten their compensation, they’re afraid to speak out. The other thing is when we have the casualties coming back like we do, arm and legs missing, the traumatic brain injuries, it’s very hard for each of us to stand up and keep going on because those are so obvious and such outstanding wounds. It’s almost like, "Well, we’re still alive. We’re whole. We would have rather lost a leg than deal with this lifelong health problem." And cancer is topping the deaths that we continue to have. We can’t get them to do a Social Security match for the deaths of the Gulf War veterans for Gulf War I. But, you know, having been a service person, you hesitate to come forward. If they have compensation, they are fearful they’ll lose it, no matter what little bit
they’ve gotten. They’re scared to speak up. And then when we talk about the new soldiers, it’s the same way. They saw their buddies killed. I found a few of them when I went to the NGWRC meeting. We had a handful of them come in. And there’s the obviously undiagnosed illnesses that are going on and the strange illnesses. One guy had already had his perithyroid gland removed. I mean, that’s not normal, not at an early age. But his driver was killed. It’s hard to get them to stand up and start talking about these things. We’ve got so much legitimate PTSD that’s not being dealt with effectively and you don’t want to mix the cases, because there are those with PTSD that are ill and will be ill and they are separate things. That’s what we’ve had to battle against. They wanted to stick us in the PTSD and for a long time, therefore, tried to get people help. Our vets that were Vietnam vets, I was told the only way I can get them help is put them under PTSD, and I’d go, "He’s got some PTSD, but he’s got medical problem that are separate. Claim them both. Don’t let them classify them one way or the other." We’re still with that problem of dealing with all the different issues. It’s like the whole system is broken and nobody is seeing that it is broken. You have people raising money publicly for the center that’s going to be developed in San Antonio. They are out there raising money now to try to get a stateof- the-arts center to help our amputees to recover as quickly and to the upmost.
ICONOCLAST: Are you familiar with the DU study being released on March 1?
NICHOLS: Yes. I haven’t read the whole study, but have picked up information coming out of Britain by Chris Busby.
ICONOCLAST: I guess the bottom line is that it somewhat proves that DU travels.
NICHOLS: Oh, yeah. There’s no doubt in my mind. I was at the border of Saudi/ Iraq, and I have been saying that all along that we had sandstorms, and the sandstorms were like hurricanes coming through. And you’re telling me that stuff didn’t carry with the sand? Oh, come on. And not only that, the sand was contaminated when we were over there, when they hit the chemical facilities on the Thomasia and 50 others that we can’t get any proof out because we haven’t had anybody come forward with the videotape like we did for Thomasia. And, the chemical contamination. You’ve got a mixture of contamination on Gulf War I. Gulf War II is, hopefully, just DU and anthrax. Hopefully. And the sand factor, which is a factor since sand has a silicon content. Look at David Bloom, riding his Bloommobile, sucking in the sand. I was sitting there going, "My God." And wondering if he took the shots that the military offered, which I bet he did, and we found out since that he did, breathing hazardous material into his lungs in the back of the Bloom-mobile, covering the story. And so, having been involved in a study that looked at hypercoagulation, a small sample study that every time we tested a Gulf War vet he showed positive, and that means you have sick blood, blood that’s going to clot, and so when he died a few of us were raising hell on trying to get people to pay attention to that hazard. We thought with David Bloom’s death that we could get some attention paid. We got a little-bitty blip. And all our soldiers were out there going through it, too. Geeze, guys, the Agent Orange bill didn’t get passed until ’91, and it didn’t effectively take care of their problems. They got limited to one agent, and there was red, white, and blue. There wasn’t just dioxin. Okay? The vets get so tired of trying to go up there and push. You’re sick and you’re trying to advocate for other sick Gulf War vets. It gets mighty hard. I go to every meeting of the research advisory committee in D.C. They meet about three times a year now, and I’m always bugging them. Come on, guys. I got a couple of them to go to the environmental medicine meeting, the chairman and the co-chairman. I was getting them together with a couple of docs, who were big doctors at one time, and an active duty flight surgeon who had gone into environmental medicine, who had the expertise. In 1990, while we were all going over there, they knew we were going to come home sick. They went to this VA headquarters and begged, "Let us teach you all what we do with environmental medicine. We can train the doctors. You can put this program in effect, finding out what’s missing in the body and replacing those components as they become deficient so that your body can continue to try to fight. And, they were ignored. And, we’ve been lied to. They kept saying, "We’re going to give you new money for research. Well, sh…, that was a big lie. They’re dodging it every which way! I just sit here and I shake my head every day, staying in tune with what’s going on. You know, with this port security and Katrina? I’m going, "Boy, I only thought one part of the system was broken, veterans care and all. I look around and feel sorry for my daughter. I feel sorry for our kids. I’ve been out there trying to make a difference for the veterans. I sacrificed my life and my relationship with my daughter to go and do that a month at a time in D.C. My God, I shouldn’t have had to do that. When some of us got tested Dr. Dorochovich collected urine samples to start getting them tested, and every urine sample got lost. He decided, "Well, I’ll start testing them here," and he started ordering equipment and the VA fired him, of course. A remarkable man. He and Dr. Rokke have suffered. The whole team has suffered. I bumped into them one at a time until I had the whole team, and I didn’t know who they were until Doug Rokke sat me down and said, "Now let’s see, little Air Force nurse, let’s see who all you’ve met." And kind of explained to me who the team Army was. Interesting. I went "Oh, my God." What are my choices? I was over there. Thought the anthrax shot was there to protect us, until I got home and found out the truth. Thought the PB was supposed to be good. Had my people take them. Didn’t force them, though. We weren’t told anything. I’m one of the sick vets, too. I also lost a brother-in-law, and now my brother. I will be headed back to Dallas shortly. I lost my brother-in-law in June and in November my brother got diagnosed and is dying of cancer. He’s back in the hospital and things aren’t looking good, so I’m trying to get my act together, my mind and emotional being together enough to face that. So many things in our country are broken, and I hope America is waking up. I hope America looks and sees what’s going on with this. One of the things that this country is supposed to be responsible for is defense and then taking care of veterans, and then natural disasters. And they’re failing. Every time I look I go, "My God." It’s not just this administration. This has been going on for years. And our Congressmen and our Senators end up being paid for. Their seats are paid for. There are people that want to run that don’t have the money backup and can’t run. There are some good veterans running with a heart and soul, but they don’t have the money, and they probably won’t win, maybe one or two, hopefully. The shame of it is that our country is not the way it was set up to be. with the common person going up there. It’s ruled by money and corporations. That’s part of the apathy in America. I look for small changes, like in ”93 or ’94 we lost Jason Clifton, who was out of Oklahoma. There was a hustle then, because the family wanted to donate his brain for research, to see if it could help us at all. And we’ve had ones after that. I kept bringing that up to the research advisory committee. Why don’t we have a place that if people want to donate these parts when they die, that might help us to find some answers for what to do, whatever. Well, lo and behold, we got the money for that and one that just died of cancer donated his brain. So they moved fast because we had one dying of cancer at the time. On the other hand, as a lot of my vets tell me, "Denise, dammit, they know! Why do we have to spend money on research? And I agree with them. There are a lot of unpublished studies in the Army and they damn-well know and you can read it in the DU documents the way some of them are worded. If the consequences of DU became known it would become a political hot subject. If we could get people to carry the story. Where do you start? During the Clinton adminstration we had to deal with the stain on the blue dress, over the vets. Fires in California, I mean, we’ve gone through everything. When we have thought we had a hot story that would make it, something would come up and take the news media off. I feel for the Katrina people still living in tents. You’re history. They’re all battling with whose fault it is and they leave the people, you know, just out there. I identify with them. I’m going, "Hey, a new group." I’ve got some Vietnam vets who have done investigations and have gone in quietly and, "We know there’s a sex trade out there," but they don’t talk about that. When they do a story they miss what they really should concentrate on and I’m going, "God!" You know, they’re controlled. We’ve tried to do rallies in D.C. Well, it’s hard to get people to travel. Just like seeing the few that went up there to the Katrina hearings, a handfull of them. How do you get the masses up there to say "We’re not going to take it anymore."
Major Denise Nichols (retired), is a Gulf War veteran and retired U.S. Air Force Reserve Major,Vice Chairman of the National Vietnam Veteran and Gulf War Veterans Coalition.
