Maj. Alan Jones (not his real name), USAF-Ret., was the picture of health prior to his 30-day stint in the Middle East as a logistics officer in Operation Desert Storm. He ran every day and took great pride in his physical condition.

But something happened to Jones while he was in the theater of operations. Shortly after returning to Germany, he started feeling bad and began experiencing respiratory problems that eventually resulted in treatment for asthma, a condition he never had before. Then, in the months and years that followed, he developed a growing fatigue that made it increasingly difficult for him to do his job.

In 1996—despite the fact that he was up for a promotion to lieutenant colonel—Jones felt he had no choice but to retire. Following a thorough physical evaluation, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) gave him a 60 percent service-connected disability, a figure that likely will go up as his condition worsens.

Jones is just one of thousands of soldiers who became chronically ill after serving in the Persian Gulf War, a literal army of service personnel afflicted with what now are known collectively as Gulf War illnesses. Researchers at the Department of Defense (DoD) and the VA have been actively studying this bizarre phenomenon with the goal of reducing the risk of war-related health problems among the next generation of troops.

With all eyes currently on Operation Iraqi Freedom, it’s easy to forget Operation Desert Storm. By the time hostilities ceased in late February 1991, the United States had deployed 697,000 troops to the theater of operations.

As the war wound down and troops returned home, many suddenly started feeling ill. Their list of complaints was long and included respiratory problems, headaches, fatigue, memory loss, sleep disturbances, rashes, and chronic muscle and joint pain. The underlying cause in many cases was easy to determine, but a surprising number remain a medical mystery.

“A contributing factor was the multiple exposure [to chemical, environmental, and other hazards] experienced by many service personnel in the region,” notes Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, deputy director for DoD’s Deployment Health Support, Health Affairs. “But the biggest problem was that the symptoms were so widespread and varying without any sort of common focus. The lack of a definable symptom complex made it very difficult to identify casuality.

“The facts are very clear that Gulf War veterans have chronic symptoms that cannot be explained with recognized medical diagnosis at a rate two to three times higher than their counterparts who did not deploy,” continues Kilpatrick. “We’ve also seen this in British, Australian, and Canadian troops who served in the gulf, and we’re actively working with coalition countries to try to understand what these issues are.”

As the number of ailing veterans climbed, the DoD established the Comprehensive Clinical Evaluation Program (CCEP), and the VA created the Gulf War Registry to offer free health evaluations to Gulf War veterans who believed their health problems might be related to their deployment. Approximately 120,000 of the 697,000 troops deployed during the Gulf War requested and received medical examinations through these programs.

Of those 120,000 veterans, 80 percent were diagnosed with illnesses recognizable to medical science. The remaining 20 percent had symptoms for which no specific disease or condition could be identified.

“This last group of veterans represents a challenge to modern medical science, which cannot satisfactorily explain why they feel ill,” notes Barbara Goodno, public affairs representative with the DoD’s Office of Deployment Health. “Although unexplained physical symptoms have been recognized for many years in general medical clinics that serve members of the general population, these veterans are of special concern.”

Since the Gulf War, the DoD, the VA, and the Department of Health and Human Services have spent a total of $212 million on 224 research projects in an attempt to better understand why so many veterans became ill and what could be done to help them cope more effectively with their chronic conditions.

“Our concern with possible deployment- related illnesses continues and is reflected in the establishment of the Deployment Health Clinical Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” declares Goodno. “This center is designed to offer specialized care to servicemembers who believe their health problems are deployment related.”

The Office of Deployment Health also established three specialized deployment health centers, which are focused on deployment health surveillance, deployment health care, and deployment health research.

Two years ago, the VA established War-Related Illness and Injury Study Centers at the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the VA Medical Center in East Orange, N.J. 

“These facilities are doing research as well as clinical care for veterans who have illnesses that appear to be related to their war experiences,” reports Dr. Susan Mather, M.P.H., chief public health and environmental hazards officer with the VA in Washington, D.C.

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