ALERT Gulf war veterans being cut again

Cut and Run: The Rell administration quietly kills a program to track the health of sick war veterans

By Andy Bromage

The tanks came rumbling off the battlefield filled with sand and discarded food wrappers.
Melissa Sterry’s job was to clean them and ready them for storage. She’d climb inside the tanks and with a simple dust pan and broom, sweep out the Iraqi sand and the rubbish left behind by the tank operators.

Sterry was sweeping up something else too, something too small to see: dust from depleted uranium, a radioactive substance the military uses to make ammunition armor-piercing and bunker-busting. For months, Sterry cleaned these tanks without protective gear, kicking depleted uranium airborne and into her lungs.

Today, Sterry is a medical train wreck. The 46-year-old Gulf War veteran takes 11 kinds of medication — some daily and others as needed for pain — and suffers from chronic headaches, upper respiratory disease, bronchitis and a host of other ailments.

Like most Gulf War vets, the federal Veterans Administration refuses to test Sterry for exposure to depleted uranium or other chemical toxins she was exposed to in the Middle East.

So Sterry turned to the state government, and in 2005 helped Connecticut become the first state in the nation to craft a law to test returning combat troops for exposure to battlefield health hazards, including depleted uranium. The law would also establish a veterans health registry to catalog mysterious symptoms crippling war vets, similar to the Connecticut Tumor Registry which tracks cancer patterns in the state. The data could be used as leverage to pressure the federal government to accept disabilities as service-related, and therefore treat them.

But the state has turned its back on Sterry and the more than 30,000 Connecticut troops who have deployed to combat zones in the Middle East and the Balkans since 1990. The Advocate has learned that Gov. Jodi Rell, through her budget office, quietly killed funding for the veterans health registry without telling the lawmakers who sponsored the program, nor the veterans whom it would serve.

Not as a last resort to deal with Connecticut’s spiraling budget crisis, mind you. As a first resort — during the very first round of budget rescissions ordered by the governor last June.

The Rell administration wiped out $165,000 set aside to pay for a research analyst to establish and manage the veterans health registry, and to pay for operating it through at least its first year. State law allows the governor to cut up to five percent of the state budget without legislative approval, which partly explains how this cut flew under the radar.

If the registry isn’t restored, hundreds of Connecticut-based troops could go undiagnosed and uncatalogued. The state has sent 16,000 troops to war since Sept. 11, 2001 and another 75 National Guardsmen and women shipped off to the southwest Asia last week, their second deployment to the war zone.
Sterry, a National Guard vet whose dazzling and heartbreaking testimony before the legislature in 2005 helped pass the registry law, found out it was cut when we called her New Haven home for reaction. Not surprisingly, she was furious.

"People really don’t care about veterans," Sterry says. "They really don’t give a shit about us. People want to trot out veterans on photo-ops. They want to go put wreaths on gravestones. But real human beings with real life problems? No, we don’t care."
 
THE WORST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
The state’s official reason for de-funding the registry: because the program hadn’t started yet, and eliminating unfilled positions is better than laying off existing employees.

The state Department of Veterans Affairs has an annual budget of $35 million, most of that coming from federal grants. The amount needed to launch the registry, $165,000, was less than one half of one percent of the department’s total budget.

Linda Schwartz, commissioner of Veterans Affairs for the state, broke the news last week to the legislature’s Select Committee on Veterans Affairs during a special meeting at the Connecticut veterans’ home in Rocky Hill. Her budget was being cut, she said, and $165,000 of it would come from the sick-soldiers registry.

What she didn’t mention, and what some lawmakers were not aware of until very recently, was that the funding was eliminated last June during Gov. Rell’s first round of state budget cuts.

In fact, after four years of hearings, debates and lobbying, the program was just days away from receiving the money it needed to hire staff and begin testing. Funding was set for release on July 1, 2008. The governor’s office announced the cut on June 24.

State Rep. Ted Graziani says the state’s message to veterans amounts to: "We’ll only take care of you if there’s a surplus."
"These people have served their country," says Graziani, an Ellington Democrat and Vietnam War veteran who co-chairs the Veterans Committee. "We’re not looking at the clientele we are trying to help. We’re looking at numbers and names on a folder. These are people who gave their lives. They did their duty."
Schwartz, the veterans affairs commissioner, says it wasn’t her decision to axe health screening for returning combat veterans. The order came from the governor’s budget shop, the state Office of Policy and Management. But she would have done the same thing, she says, had the decision been hers.
"If I have to decide if I am going to start [the registry], which is really very close to my heart, or forgo medical treatment for the veterans here, that’s a no-brainer," Schwartz says in a phone interview from her Rocky Hill office. "You put it on the back burner because you have to treat the people here."
 
Four years ago, the legislature heard riveting testimony from Gulf War veterans who were coming down with mystery maladies. Melissa Sterry was one of them, memorably lining up the bottles of prescription pills she takes for pain for the legislators to see.

The General Assembly responded by establishing a task force to study the health needs of returning vets and set up a health registry to collect data from troops, on a voluntary basis, about where they served, what they did, what they were exposed to and to profile their physical health.
Connecticut was the first to outline such a program, and was quickly copied by Louisiana, Texas and other states. State Sen. Gayle Slossberg, a Milford Democrat who in 2005 co-chaired the Veterans Committee, says her hope was to link up state registries to create a multi-state database. Instead, Slossberg got news from Commissioner Schwartz two months ago that the registry was dead on arrival.

"What a registry does, it allows us to go to the federal government and say this is a service-connected disability," Slossberg explains. "That is their standard. If it is service-related, they take care of you. If it is not, they don’t."

However one feels about war, Slossberg adds, "We owe them proper health care when they come back to this country."

Schwartz doesn’t disagree, but says testing for depleted uranium is expensive.

"There was no money allocated for depleted uranium testing," Schwartz says. "The testing cost $1,000 per person."

Schwartz says she’s looking for alternative ways to keep the registry alive, including having it run by the state Department of Public Health. That might actually be cheaper, and more efficient, she says.
"I have limited resources," Schwartz says. "I don’t have a lot of scientists on my staff. [The health department] does and already runs the tumor registry. It’s not to abandon our men and women coming home. I have not abandoned the goal. I’m looking for another way. We’re going to give it a shot."
But a shot is no guarantee. The two-year state budget deficit is estimated in the $6 billion to $8 billion range and finding cash for new programs, or even piggybacked ones, will be a tall order this year — even when the beneficiaries are sick veterans, a group no politician wouldn’t bend over backwards for.
To Sterry, cutting help for vets to balance the books is just plain heartless.

"We understand care and maintenance of our military vehicles, but we don’t understand we need to do the same for our troops," Sterry says. "Do you want to change the oil in the engine or do you want to replace the engine when it seizes up? These actions are just a reflection of, We’ll just change the engine when it seizes up."
Rell’s press office was asked to explain why they cut funds for the registry and to respond to reactions like those of Sterry that denying health screening to combat troops is cold-hearted. Despite four calls and one e-mail to the governor’s press shop over three days, we received no response to our questions. The governor’s chief spokesman, Christopher Cooper, referred us the Jeffrey Beckham, undersecretary for legislative affairs at OPM, who responded with this statement:

"That program was new and had not gotten started. The agency required some cooperation from the federal government to get it going and I understand that cooperation was somewhat lacking. Given that we were struggling to protect existing programs, we thought that not going forward with that new program was a reasonable call."

We asked Beckham in a follow-up e-mail to elaborate about the lack of federal cooperation and respond to the questions unanswered by the governor’s staff, but did not receive a response by press time.
 
SOLDIER OF MISFORTUNE
In a cozy attic room of her New Haven home, a cat on her lap, Sterry recounts her saga.

She spent six months stationed in Kuwait in the winter of 1991-92 and before that did a stint in Saudi Arabia. There, her job was to keep track of everything assigned to combat units: trucks, typewriters, computers, VCRs and TVs and the like.

In Kuwait, she was responsible for cleaning and restocking the tanks, trucks and armored personnel carries stationed at Camp Doha, a sprawling military base one-square mile in size.
It was there her exposure to the toxins of warfare began. Sterry was injected with seven different vaccines. She didn’t even know the names of them and they don’t appear on her medical records, she says. The troops wore flea collars around their wrists and ankles to keep sand fleas and sand mites at bay. Their army uniforms were soaked in chemicals to suppress body heat so they weren’t detected on thermal scans. "It was just a witch’s brew," Sterry says, "a medical nightmare."

When she deployed at age 29, Sterry says, she could run two miles in 16 minutes 5 seconds, and in two minutes do 44 sit-ups or 20 push-ups. When she returned to the States at age 30, she couldn’t walk around the block. "The only thing that happened in between was a big old war," she says.
Today, Sterry takes 10 types of medication for a laundry list of health problems that includes: restricted airway disease, chronic diarrhea, blood in her urine and stools, digestive problems, three heart attacks and joint and muscle aches.

"I don’t know if it was depleted uranium. I don’t know if it was the experimental vaccines, I don’t know if it was the oil-well fires, I don’t know if it was the chemicals. I don’t know if it was everything combined together. But it was something."

For Sterry and perhaps other veterans, the battle is personal. Sterry blames Schwartz, the state veterans commissioner, for letting the health registry get de-funded.

"She was a nurse in Vietnam," Sterry says of Schwartz. "She was part of the movement to get Agent Orange recognized. It’s why people appointed her commissioner. She should know better.

"It took 16 years for Agent Orange to be recognized, 18 years for Persian Gulf Syndrome," Sterry goes on. "What are these guys getting hit with? Over and over and over people deny there is a problem until enough of us have died so that it becomes cost-effective to treat people."
It’s penny wise and pound foolish, Sterry says.

"The decision to cut $165,000 is going to cost the state millions in the long run, between unemployment and HUSKY health insurance and Section 8 housing and welfare and food stamps and energy assistance," she says. "Just by changing the types of light switches they use, they could save $165,000."
She’s right. Troops are returning to Connecticut from Iraq and Afghanistan to a host of seemingly avoidable problems related to health care access, employment, housing and education benefits. It’s all painfully spelled out in a new report released last week that surveyed the needs of returning combat troops. The paper was prepared for the state Department of Veterans Affairs by researchers at Central Connecticut State University.
For instance: Though 80 percent of vets surveyed described their health as "good" or "excellent," almost half say they’re less healthy than when they deployed, and 30 percent report unmet health needs.

Twenty-one percent of surveyed vets screened positive for probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and one in five screened positive for probable traumatic brain injury (TBI), a growing epidemic among combat vets whose skulls are rattled by bomb blasts and improvised explosive devices. Mild cases of TBI give victims headaches, confusion and light-headedness. The most severe cases come with ringing in the ears, memory loss, a bad taste in the mouth and sudden and violent mood changes.

The report doesn’t recommend a veterans health registry as such, but it comes pretty close. "This prevalence rate suggests that TBI may be a significant problem for many returning veterans and highlights the need for resources to investigate this health issue," the report reads.
 
NO ONE TOLD US THE FUNDS WERE CUT
What?!?
That was state Rep. Pat Dillon’s reaction when we asked for her reaction to the health registry’s demise. The New Haven Democrat says she knew nothing about the funding cut before we called for comment.

Dillon’s been a staunch advocate for sick veterans, once telling off Donald Rumsfeld to his face over the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on National Guard troops and reservists to fight the Iraq war, who receive comparably lesser benefits than active duty military. In Connecticut, she spearheaded the effort to test returning vets for depleted uranium exposure.

Dillon says health screening for troops is a moral issue and a financial one.

"If you don’t get them into the federal system, they may end up in the emergency room," Dillon says. "I don’t think state and local taxpayers should be picking up the cost of health care for someone who was damaged or injured doing their duty."

The cut bothers state Sen. Andrew Maynard for a different reason: The governor slashed a program authorized by the legislature without consultation. State law gives her that power, but Maynard’s still displeased that she used it on this.

Maynard wonders if the bad economy became a convenient excuse to cut a program the administration was never wild about to begin with.

"They’ll say, ‘We’re not killing it, but we just can’t do it in this timeframe,’" says Maynard, a Stonington Democrat who co-chairs the Veterans Committee. "I don’t think that’s genuine. These are tough times but I don’t like the idea that it’s done unilaterally."

For her part, Sterry and hundreds like her are left to soldier on. Last spring, Sterry underwent a double mastectomy for breast cancer. She’s not sure it has anything to do with her combat experience ("breast cancer is an epidemic") but she can’t even be tested for it. Her health has not deteriorated dramatically since 2005 but it certainly hasn’t gotten any better.

"Every day is just more, so now I take afternoon naps because I am tired," she says. "I’m just tired."

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