Kos points us to a Life Magazine story about unusual birth defects in the children of Iraqi war veterans:
Kennedi was born without a thyroid. If not for daily hormone treatments, she would die. What disfigures her features, however, is another congenital condition: hemangiomas, benign tumors made of tangled blood vessels. Since she was a few weeks old, they have been popping up all over–on her eyelids and lips; in her throat and spinal canal. Laser surgery shrinks them, but they return again and again. They distort her speech, threaten her life. And, inevitably, they draw the stares of strangers. “When people see her,” says Shana, “they say, ‘Ooh, what happened to your baby?’”
Neither Shana nor her husband can answer that question conclusively, but they suspect that Kennedi’s troubles have their origins in the Gulf, where Darrell served as an Army paratrooper. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he faced a mind-boggling array of environmental hazards. Like an estimated 45,000 of his comrades, he has developed symptoms–in his case, asthma and recurring pneumonia–linked to an elusive affliction known as Gulf War syndrome. And like a growing number of Gulf War veterans, some of whom remain apparently healthy, he has fathered a child with devastating birth defects.
Not only do we expose our soldiers to this, then we pretend the results aren’t real so we don’t have to pay the bills.
These “Christians” running our country should be ashamed of themselves.
One of the most likely suspects is the widespread use of depleted uranium in American weapons (bombs and bullets).
Shame doesn’t appear in the Republican dictionary. Nor do humility, irony, empathy and compromise.