by Spider » Fri Mar 21, 2014 5:23 pm
Gulf War Syndrome is also physiological. Its not an imaginary thing to be put in quotes. Probably a result of being downwind when Saddam was burning his stockpiles of chemical weapons. Also the crazy meds, depleted uranium munitions, oil fires, etc. Among other things. PTSD is a different issue, though it can be a secondary factor. It took a long time for the government to come to terms with this. I've got 2 uncles, an aunt, and a cousin who wound up getting large settlements as a result of their resultant chronic health problems after the VA finally decided that physiological symptoms couldn't be corrected by shrinks. After the better part of two decades.
Trouble is that the military recklessly destroyed tremendous stockpiles of WMD's in Iraq, resulting in the exposure of hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to seriously nasty stuff. For obvious reasons they have a big interest in never, ever, admitting fault for that, and trying to explain it away. There are proper ways to dispose of that stuff. Simply blowing up depots full of it and releasing it into the atmosphere is a bad way to go about it.
We have to try pretty hard to convince ourselves that all these people spent all that time in a chemical weapon/pesticide/radioactive/oil well fire soup and didn't get screwed up by it. GWS shows up in veterans from various countries in very similar ways.