Fighting Bioterror
America's military services joined forces to face the challenge of deadly anthrax attacks.
By Shelley Davis

As the nation's focus turned to combating terrorism after Sept. 11, Marine Corps troops deployed on real-world missions loaded with the tools of their trade: m-16s, Ka-Bars, and ... vacuum cleaners? Guns and knives may be effective in fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but when the enemy is a nearly invisible spore, a hepa (high efficiency particle arresting)–filtered vacuum cleaner may be the most effective tool available. So when Marines from the Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force (cbirf) deployed to Capitol Hill last October, they packed cotton swabs, respirators, personal protective gear—and yes, vacuum cleaners.

By the time the Marines suited up, there was no way to distinguish them from others collecting biological samples from the offices of the nations' top elected officials. Working alongside personnel from all services, civilian agencies, and contractors, the Marines from cbirf were part of a multifaceted and joint effort to determine the extent of anthrax contamination in the nation's capital, New York City, and other affected areas of the country.

Joint operation

The post-Sept. 11 response to the bioterrorist threat—especially anthrax—brought together members from all military services in some unexpected places. Although vacuuming Senate offices did not fit any predicted scenario, the nation's military forces responded to each twist with teamwork and skill.

Almost every aspect of the military response to the appearance of anthrax-laced letters involved the melding of service capabilities, personalities, and bureaucracies, yet without exception, the personnel interviewed for this story responded with a single voice: It worked!

Ask Air Force Lt. Col. Debra Niemeyer, who deployed to New York City: "Everyone was there for the common good and came away with a better appreciation for each other's capabilities." Ask Marine Corps Lt. Col. Scott Graham from cbirf: "We worked like we'd worked together for years." Ask Army Col. Eric Henchel, who ran his lab nonstop to test anthrax samples: "We were thrilled to have this opportunity to serve."

The immediacy and extent of the threat posed by anthrax brought military personnel together with the fbi, the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), the Centers for Disease Control (cdc), public health officials, and first responders. While the cdc serves as the lead agency to respond to biological terrorism in the homeland, it quickly turned to the Department of Defense (DoD) to augment its capabilities, primarily in collecting and analyzing laboratory samples to determine the existence and extent of anthrax contamination.

Testing the air

Military units spend most of their time training, hoping they will never have to use their skills in a real-world environment, but the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon immediately prompted additional concern about bioterrorism. Specialized military units quickly determined that no chemical or biological weapons were used in the Sept. 11 attack. Within five hours after planes hit the World Trade Center, a group of Coast Guard specialists from the Atlantic Strike Team, based at Fort Dix, N.J., were in place at ground zero.

"Initially our job was to conduct air monitoring and assess the overall environmental impact on the area," says Coast Guard CWO Leo Deon, who spent four weeks in lower Manhattan and four more weeks on Capitol Hill testing for anthrax. "We did not detect the presence of any chemical or biological agents through our initial surveys, so we focused on air quality at the site," says Deon.

Coast Guard personnel remain in New York City today, testing air quality with a focus on worker health and safety, yet remaining ever vigilant to the potential for a bioterrorist attack.

If called upon to deploy on a real-world mission, most Army units anticipate an overseas assignment. When the call came to deploy the Army's 7th Chemical Company from Fort Polk, La., the unit's commander, Capt. Steve Basso, quickly readied his troops and equipment for a domestic location: the Pentagon.

As the only active duty unit in the Army with the dedicated mission of providing biological surveillance, the company required nine military transport aircraft to move its personnel and its Humvee-mounted Biological Integrated Detection System (bids) to the Pentagon. There, the unit provided biological monitoring for seven weeks.

"This is what we train for. We hope it never comes, but we were proud to do our job," says Basso. The unit's redeployment in mid-December marked the arrival of a system to provide permanent biological monitoring at the Pentagon. Operated by contractors, the Joint Biological Point Detection System can detect, identify, and warn of the presence of biological warfare agents at levels lower than the bids it replaced.

Attack upon attack

The military has been preparing to respond to a bioterrorist attack for years, but no one anticipated the anthrax letters that provided a bizarre and frightening follow-up to the Sept. 11 terrorist assault. Experts agree that one of the most troublesome aspects of a bioterrorist attack is the difficulty of determining an attack has occurred. The elusive nature of bioterrorism turned out to be one of very few predictable elements in the anthrax attack that put the nation on edge for a second time in the fall of 2001.

The anthrax story escalated Oct. 15 when an employee in Sen. Thomas A. Daschle's (D-S.D.) office opened what appeared to be a letter from an elementary school. Powdered anthrax spilled out, and spores rapidly and invisibly dispersed through the air.

It didn't take long for Daschle's staff to realize something potentially devastating had just occurred as the envelope released its deadly contents. Within hours, the fbi delivered the letter and its remaining contents to the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. There, Army scientists hunched over microscopes to analyze the material, which turned out to be a surprisingly virulent strain of anthrax.

The future is here

Led by Henchel, the Diagnostic Systems Division of USAMRIID has spent the last decade developing diagnostic tools for high-priority bioterrorism threat agents, including anthrax. "We were always planning for the future," says Henchel. "Unfortunately, the future came in 2001. We hoped this day would never come, but we would not be able to do this job if we had not had that time to prepare."

USAMRIID is one of six major laboratories (part of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command, also based at Fort Detrick) that develop products to improve battlefield medical treatment. Equipped for Biosafety Level 4, the highest level of protection for a laboratory, USAMRIID is the military's lead lab for medical biological defense research.

With its capabilities, biosafety level, and professional staff, USAMRIID became the focal point for an avalanche of biological samples after Sept. 11. This highly specialized lab normally handles about 10 samples a month, sent by the fbi or Secret Service from events such as political conventions, the State of the Union address, and nato meetings.

"Little did we know these were only warm-up exercises," says Henchel. Before Sept. 11, a staff of six worked in the Special Pathogens Sample Test Laboratory of USAMRIID. Soon, all 60 personnel from Henchel's Diagnostic Systems Division were testing samples. By late October, the staff had swelled to 82, with personnel borrowed from other USAMRIID areas and from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

To deal with the flood of samples, three teams worked 12-hour shifts, processing 100 samples a shift. "It's been hard for us," says Henchel, a microbiologist with 25 years of active duty service. "We were a little institution, and people were expecting big things from us, but we quickly developed a routine." By early 2002, the lab had processed nearly 12,000 samples and performed more than 90,000 specialized tests to determine the content of a substance.

Ready to rock

As congressional staffers retreated from their offices in mid-October, the Marines from cbirf charged in. Many of the samples sent to USAMRIID came from swabs and vacuum cleaner filters collected by military personnel who arrived on Capitol Hill just days after the letter to Daschle contaminated the Hart Senate Office Building.

The brainchild of former Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Charles C. Krulak and Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, who wanted to make sure the Marine Corps could respond to a bioterrorist attack similar to the 1995 release of sarin gas in the Toyko subway, cbirf came into existence in 1996. The unit is assigned to the recently reactivated 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (Antiterrorism) at Camp Lejeune, N.C. With a staff of fewer than 400, cbirf keeps 100 members on a constant 24-hour alert. Once on scene, cbirf's decontamination section can be up and "ready to rock," decontaminating victims and gear in only 14 minutes, says cbirf spokesman 1st Lt. Paul Cabellon.

The Marines from cbirf frequently train alongside first responders, so integrating their forces with the joint team led by the U.S. Capitol Police in the Capitol Hill anthrax operation came naturally. Just weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, a cbirf team trained with the New York City Fire Department in urban search-and-rescue operations in a simulated gas attack. "We worked side-by-side with many of the firefighters who died on Sept. 11," says Graham. One of those victims was 63-year-old New York Fire Department battalion chief and former Marine Ray Downey, who helped train Marine Corps and Navy personnel and warned of the danger of a terrorist attack long before he died in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

The Capitol Hill operation was truly a joint mission. Coast Guard Cmdr. Gail Kulisch served as the assistant incident commander under the Capitol Police. The on-site safety officer came from the epa, and military personnel from all services augmented the effort, which involved biological sampling, decontamination, and command support.

Call for help

When the New York City Department of Health laboratory became overwhelmed with the influx of biological samples as the anthrax scare escalated in October, Mayor Rudy Guiliani turned to the military for help. "He had heard about our rapid response teams and wanted to put one on the ground," explains Lt. Cmdr. Len Peruski, a Navy microbiologist who led a DoD team to New York City.

The order to deploy came Oct. 19 through the Army's Directorate of Military Support, which coordinates civilian requests for military assistance. Within a few hours, Peruski had loaded several vehicles with 800 pounds of equipment, his team, and Niemeyer, chief of the Force Protection Division in the Air Force surgeon general's office.

The joint team's mission was to assist the New York Department of Health in processing biological samples for anthrax. "The Department of Health was first hit with the disaster on [Sept. 11], then the anthrax, and they were just overwhelmed," says Peruski. "It would have buried any public health laboratory in the United States to have that happen." The team was in place by 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 20, with their mobile lab operational 90 minutes after receiving lab space.

The deployment lasted nine days, as Navy and Air Force personnel worked alongside the cdc to assist New York public health officials. "Different bureaucracies work in different ways," explains Niemeyer, who says that putting DoD personnel to work in a metropolitan public health lab was challenging but in the end "worked very well."

Augmenting forces

Response to the bioterrorist threat has not been limited to active duty units. The Army Reserve 310th and 318th Chemical companies were activated as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Other Reserve and Guard units focus on supporting civil defense needs throughout the country. Army Reserve units include many chemical detection and reconnaissance companies along with medical and medical-support organizations ready to assist civilian communities in case of a local attack.

In the late 1990s, Congress authorized 32 National Guard units to be known as Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams (wmd-csts) with the mission of advising civilian responders and expediting the arrival of military forces in response to a bioterrorist attack on the homeland. Ten wmd-csts were certified by the end of 2000, organized around the boundaries of Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) regions to expedite coordination between civilian and military responders.

The 3rd wmd-cst in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., is commanded by Lt. Col. Xavier Stewart, a 20-year veteran of the Army Reserve who holds a doctorate in public health. Since Sept. 11, the 3rd wmd-cst, assigned to the fema region that includes Washington, D.C., has deployed 37 times. "Our missions varied from checking out suspicious packages to checking for [anthrax] in mail rooms and buildings," says Stewart. "We helped alleviate a lot of concerns and provided support to the public." He adds, "That's what the taxpayers pay us to do."

Back to the future

Although military labs continue to test biological samples from anthrax hoaxes or unidentified powdery substances, no anthrax-laced letters have appeared since the November discovery of a letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Similar to the one opened in Daschle's office in October, it was immediately delivered unopened to USAMRIID for testing and evaluation.

As the flood of anthrax samples began to slow, military researchers returned to the work that dominated their calendars before Sept. 11—planning to deal with future bioterrorist attacks. Military personnel from all services are integrating lessons learned from the recent terrorist attack into new contingency scenarios. The speed at which laboratories can become overwhelmed and the need for specific procedures to handle environmental specimens were two of the most important lessons learned.

"The [anthrax] incident highlighted the necessity of having a national response network of laboratories," says Air Force Col. Dan Brown, director for Clinical Laboratory Medicine for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who is spearheading an effort to integrate military labs into the cdc's national laboratory response network.

"We have DoD laboratory assets spread throughout the United States that can support the cdc," says Brown, assets ranging from research facilities like USAMRIID to patient-oriented laboratories in military hospitals. About 50 percent of military labs are already part of the network, and Brown expects all DoD labs to be on board by the end of this year.

Already, Brown says, the military has made a significant contribution to homeland defense against a bioterrorist attack, and the nation has become more aware of the specialized abilities of the military. Brown credits the military with "bringing process to a situation of utter chaos. ... The military has done some tremendous things during this outbreak. The country needed our help, and we gave our help."