Veterans kept the military's secret, some until death

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Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:30:20 -0500

Veterans kept the military's secret, some until death

 

 

 

Veterans kept the military's secret, some until death

 

After chemical tests revealed, redress promised

 

November 11, 2004

 

BY DAVID ZEMAN

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

 

Al Felgendreger entered World War II an anonymous Army grunt. He

exited a war hero, gaining three Bronze Stars in the Pacific.

 

Friendly and bright, Felgendreger returned to Philadelphia after the

war to embrace his new wife and his own lofty ambitions.

 

His life was busy, secure, overflowing with promise.

 

And then, suddenly, it was not.

 

In 1955, Felgendreger suffered what his wife Eleanore characterizes as

a nervous breakdown. The outgoing chemist was now depressed, sluggish,

and reluctant to leave home. There were times when he drank too much.

He asked his pastor to care for his wife and three children if

something happened to him. He spent two months in a hospital.

 

" I've always wondered, " Eleanore says now, " if those tests could have

caused that. "

 

The tests that haunt Eleanore Felgendreger do not appear in her

husband's Army records. Like thousands of World War II soldiers and

sailors, Felgendreger's work as a human guinea pig was omitted from

his file. In the autumn of 1943, he served in the 1st Chemical Casual

Company, a unit exposed to mustard agent and other poisons in the gas

chambers of Maryland's Edgewood Arsenal -- tests that would stalk some

men, physically and psychologically, until their deaths.

 

Tests they were forbidden to discuss.

 

With the help of a psychiatrist, Felgendreger eventually regained his

footing and returned to work.

 

But he never discussed his breakdown again.

 

Best and the brightest

 

If ever an Army unit was poised for excellence, it was the 1st

Chemical Casual Company.

 

Mostly young science buffs, the soldiers of 1st Chemical had been

culled from science programs across the country for chemical warfare

training. But they soon learned that their value to the Army was more

as lab rats than lab scientists.

 

They were shipped to Edgewood and herded into chambers to test how

long uniforms, ointments and gas masks could withstand chemicals that

might be unleashed in combat. When the experiments ended two months

later, some, like Felgendreger, would gain Bronze Stars and Purple

Hearts overseas, or embark on estimable careers in science, medicine

or academia.

 

Their ranks included Ivy League professors, computer pioneers,

chemists at Fortune 500 firms, a Guggenheim Fellow, and another fellow

who pursued the life of a pastry chef.

 

Scanning the resumes, one might assume Edgewood was but a brief

interlude in a soldier's life -- distasteful, perhaps, but long since

forgotten.

 

Yet many soldiers quietly took Edgewood to their graves. Sworn to

secrecy, or just plain stoic, the men of 1st Chemical rarely spoke of

the harrowing experiments at the Maryland camp -- not to their

families, and not to their doctors, even as they succumbed to diseases

they traced to Edgewood. Decades later, no one can say for sure

whether Felgendreger's collapse also was linked to those chambers.

What is known is that, for many of these men, the silence that

surrounded the project began to feel like a prison, one that separated

them from their wives and children, one they felt they could never

escape. In 1983 -- 40 years after the chamber tests -- Lee Landauer of

suburban Baltimore began treatment for skin cancer that still bedevils

him. His elderly mother delicately broached the subject of his

service. What, she asked, really happened at Edgewood?

 

" Nothing I can tell you, " the ex-platoon sergeant said.

 

And that was that.

 

Some families learned of the chambers and their psychological hold on

the soldiers only after the men died. They would be sorting through

papers left by the men and discover a journal or note that betrayed a

well-guarded despair.

 

" See what happens when one has been involved with Army poison gasses? "

Albert Jasuta, a veteran with leukemia and lung disease wrote, seven

weeks before his death.

 

To be sure, of the scores of soldiers from 1st Chemical interviewed

for this article, several spoke favorably of their work at Edgewood

and defended the military's decision to expose at least 4,000 soldiers

and sailors to dangerous levels of toxins in chamber and field tests.

Germany and Japan had used chemical and biological weapons in the

past, they noted. The United States had a duty to protect its troops,

to learn all it could about how mustard might spread along the front

lines of Europe, or the tropics of the Pacific.

 

" We were going against Hitler! " said Brooklyn recruit Abe Hedaya,

pausing to let his point register. " He was crazy, and we had to get him! "

 

Whatever the program's merits, this much is certain: Pentagon

officials lured young recruits from boot camp with the promise of

furloughs, then bullied them if they tried to back out. They misled

the men about the health risks involved, then denied the tests ever

took place. For nearly 50 years, the secret held.

 

Even as some men faltered.

 

Worse than combat

 

For many relatives, the soldier who marched off to Edgewood in '43 was

different from the one who returned after the war. Of course, that is

generally true of soldiers in all conflicts; war changes those who

fight it. But something about the experiences of the chemical

volunteers in sealed chambers, and their inability to talk about their

experiences, transformed them in ways even combat never would.

 

Pvt. Francis Earnshaw Jr., a lanky blond chemical engineering student

from West Virginia, saw his military career collapse one afternoon in

November 1943, a few weeks after he left the chemical testing at

Edgewood and returned to boot camp at Camp Sibert, Ala. As his company

drilled that day, Earnshaw was overcome with anxiety and laid down in

the field, unable to move until other soldiers carried him to bed.

When Camp Sibert doctors saw him later, Earnshaw's lip quivered and he

fought back tears. He'd been having headaches, he said, brought on by

" nerves. " He was hospitalized for a month.

 

" He does not have enough confidence to feel that he will be able to

adjust, " an Army psychiatrist wrote. " Diagnosis: Psychoneurosis,

anxiety type, manifested by sleeplessness, nervousness and mild

depression. "

 

Earnshaw's records are typical of ailing chemical soldiers in that

they make almost no reference to the experiments that preceded his

hospitalization. From his file, it is unclear whether Earnshaw even

told doctors he had taken part in chemical tests. This was not

unusual. Even doctors stationed at Edgewood during the war were often

not told what chemicals had injured their patients.

 

Earnshaw received an honorable discharge in December 1943. Yet even

though he was released on medical grounds, the government denied his

claim for disability, ruling that his nervous condition was unrelated

to his military service.

 

He died of a heart attack in 1997, having never discussed Edgewood

with Mary Jo, his wife of 50 years.

 

Not every soldier's life ended badly -- far from it. For many in the

unit, the postwar years were marked by academic success and staggering

career advancement.

 

After his war service, Bill Chupka left the coal country of eastern

Pennsylvania for a classical education at the University of Chicago.

One of his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers was Howard Hoffman, a former

chamber mate at Edgewood, who later became a professor at Bryn Mawr.

 

Fraternity life, as Chupka tells it, was more " Masterpiece Theatre "

than " Animal House. "

 

" The evening conversations were very civilized arguments more

typically centered on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle ... Nietzsche,

Einstein, national politics and other serious affairs, " Chupka, now

professor emeritus of chemistry at Yale and a former Guggenheim

Fellow, recalled in an e-mail. " The music was exclusively classical

and opera. "

 

Other soldiers flourished as well. Walter Butinsky became patent

counsel for Eli Lilly and Company. Roy Wiig was a pioneer in computer

program development at IBM. John Hogan returned to Bountiful, Utah, as

a family doctor. Thomas Mullen was an engineer at B.F. Goodrich. Cason

Callaway Jr. became a respected businessman and philanthropist in Pine

Mountain, Ga.

 

The veterans of 1st Chemical grew comfortably into middle age,

gradually putting their war service behind them, or so they thought.

 

Cold War changes

 

As the Cold War shifted the focus of military research, Edgewood also

evolved.

 

From 1950 well into the 1970s, Edgewood scientists -- concerned that

the communists were developing truth serums -- began their own

research into mind control. They began testing the effects of LSD and

other hallucinogens on U.S. servicemen and civilians, often without

their consent. It was not until the early 1970s that the military's

treatment of its servicemen was seriously scrutinized as evidence also

emerged that Americans were being mistreated in a variety government

research -- from bacteria injected into children at an Ohio orphanage;

to radiation exposure on prison inmates; to the Tuskegee Experiment,

in which government researchers declined to treat 400 impoverished

black men for syphilis so the scientists could monitor the course of

the illness.

 

Like the World War II chemical program before them, the studies marked

an unsettling shift in scientific research. With each new experiment,

wrote medical ethicist David Rothman, clinical investigations were

being designed " to benefit not the research subjects, but others. "

 

Yet while dozens of government abuses were exposed, the World War II

chemical tests remained shrouded in the decades-old vow of secrecy.

 

In the 1970s, a few Army and Navy veterans claimed illnesses they

traced to chemical testing. But one by one, the Defense Department

thwarted the claims by simply denying the experiments took place.

 

Most veterans accepted the rejections and faded away.

 

Nat Schnurman plowed on.

 

Finally, some answers

 

Schnurman, who lives on a bluff above the James River outside

Richmond, Va., was sitting with his wife in his doctor's office one

day in 1975, wondering why his body seemed to be breaking down at age

50. He had lung disease, hearing loss and vision problems. He had

chronic pain in his legs, chest and stomach. After undergoing medical

examinations for decades, he was at a loss to explain his faltering

health.

 

His doctor, who by coincidence had once trained at Edgewood, asked

Schnurman if he had ever worked with chemicals.

 

" No, " Schnurman replied.

 

" Were you ever in the service? "

 

" Yes. "

 

" Were you ever in any... " and here the doctor paused, " special programs? "

 

Joy Schnurman, who until then had known nothing of her husband's

participation in mustard gas testing, recalls vividly what happened next.

 

" Nat just turned white as a sheet, " she said. " And then the tears came

and came, and out came the story. "

 

Schnurman joined the Navy at 17 and was sent to Bainbridge Naval

Training Center in Maryland, where volunteers were being recruited to

test " summer clothing. "

 

He was sent to a gas chamber at Edgewood six times in seven days. On

his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in.

Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged

for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to

on a snowbank outside the chamber.

 

He completed his Naval service, but his health steadily grew worse. He

told no one of the tests at Edgewood until that 1975 doctor's visit.

 

Schnurman filed for benefits from the VA and spent the next 17 years

pursuing records that would support his claim. Blocked at every turn

by a bureaucracy that denied access to his files -- that denied in

fact that he was ever at Edgewood -- Schnurman eventually collected

box loads of documents.

 

His cause also benefited from renewed attention to chemical warfare in

the late 1980s, most notably by Iraq's use of mustard gas on its own

Kurdish population and in its war with Iran. In 1989, an Australian

documentary, " Keen as Mustard, " exposed how the Australian government

denied the claims of its World War II soldiers because it did not want

to reveal its role in human testing. That same year, a Canadian

journalist exposed Canada's World War II program. In July 1990, the

Richmond Times-Dispatch published the first of many stories on U.S.

chemical gas veterans.

 

Around the same time, Schnurman's story caught the interest of

producers at " 60 Minutes " and Porter Goss, a Florida congressman.

Goss, who is now CIA director, lobbied colleagues in Congress to

compensate Schnurman and other World War II chemical volunteers for

their illnesses.

 

But not until June 11, 1991, days before a " 60 Minutes " expose on

Schnurman's saga, did the Pentagon acknowledge the WWII program for

the first time. The VA immediately announced it would compensate

veterans who took part in chamber or field tests, or who were exposed

to high levels of toxins in the production or transport of chemicals,

for any of seven illnesses.

 

VA promises action

 

Because the military destroyed or hid many records relating to

chemical testing, the VA also said it would relax the evidence

required to prove an illness was linked to service. Under the new

rules, veterans exposed to poisonous gases would only have to show

they later suffered from laryngitis, chronic bronchitis, emphysema,

asthma or some eye diseases to win benefits.

 

The VA asked a committee of the National Academy of Sciences to see if

any other diseases could be linked to the chemicals. Jay Katz, a Yale

University law professor and ethicist, urged the committee to look

beyond the medical literature and demand that the military track down

every veteran, or his family, and warn them of the health risks. " The

soldiers who 'volunteered' for these experiments had every expectation

that they would be treated fairly by their officers and surely by the

physicians, " he wrote. " As doctors, we ask our patients to trust us,

and this trust was manipulated, exploited and betrayed...You have no

choice but to recommend that [the volunteers] be apprised of what had

been done to them. Doing otherwise is an abdication of medical

responsibility. "

 

In January 1993, the committee issued " Veterans at Risk, " a chronicle

of the mistreatment of World War II chemical volunteers. The

servicemen, the committee found, were recruited " through lies and

half-truths. "

 

" Most appalling, " the committee wrote, " was the fact that no follow-up

medical care or monitoring was provided for any of the World War II

human subjects, " for thousands of chemical warfare production workers

or for the hundreds of military personnel who survived a mustard gas

ship explosion in Bari, Italy, in 1943.

 

The committee urged the VA to identify " each human subject in the WWII

testing program's chamber and field tests, " as well as chemical

production workers so they could " be medically evaluated and followed

by the VA. "

 

Even for dead veterans, " their surviving family members deserve to

know about the testing programs, the exposures and the potential

results of those exposures, " the committee said.

 

The report also added to the list of diseases linked to testing:

respiratory cancers, skin cancer, a variety of skin abnormalities,

leukemia, chronic pulmonary disease, sexual dysfunction, and mood and

anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

 

The report dismissed the argument that the exigencies of war justified

the tactics used to recruit volunteers. The military's use of its own

personnel in LSD and radiation programs " demonstrated a well-ingrained

pattern of abuse and neglect, " the panel concluded.

 

Upon the report's release, the Defense Department quickly accepted the

recommendations, apologized, and pledged to help the VA find the men.

 

" The years of silent suffering have ended for these WWII veterans who

participated in secret testing during their military service, "

declared Anthony Principi, then acting VA secretary.

 

The VA announced it already was taking steps to find veterans involved

in the tests and grant them the benefits they deserved. The agency

directed its regional offices to track Navy and Army claims involving

chemical exposure. " This log should be kept current and available for

random review, " the directive said.

 

The VA asked the Defense Department for any rosters of servicemen

involved in the tests. Once the names were gathered, the VA pledged to

collaborate with the Internal Revenue Service and the National

Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to obtain current

addresses for the veterans so they could be contacted directly. Valid

claims could fetch up to $1,730 a month in disability, as well as free

medical care. Widows also could qualify.

 

By early 1993, government assurances were plentiful and upbeat.

 

" Be assured this will not be treated as business as usual, " President

Bill Clinton declared in February 1993.

 

Nobody really knew how many WWII gas veterans and chemical workers

were still alive.

 

" It may be in the tens of thousands, " Goss told a House subcommittee.

" That is an astonishing number of people to have gone through a

process, which we have, as a government, officially denied ever happened. "

 

But for many of the soldiers in the 1st Chemical Casual Company, the

assurances were too late.

 

Albert Pike, who owned a medical supply store in Akron, Ohio, died of

lung cancer and respiratory failure on May 8, 1990, 13 months before

the military came clean.

 

He received no benefits for those diseases.

 

Pike, however, had received compensation for mustard burns shortly

after the war. On Jan. 30, 1946, one day after he was honorably

discharged, the VA awarded Pike a monthly disability pension of $11.50

for the burns.

 

During the long illnesses that killed him at age 67, Pike never

contacted the VA to file a new claim. And for many years after

" Veterans at Risk " was published, his family never heard from the

government. But in 1998, his children said, Pike's widow received a

letter from the military inquiring about his health. The answer was in

Pike's VA file, if anyone had bothered to look. The VA had paid $450

for Pike's burial. It classified his death as " non-service related. "

 

His widow was given a flag.

 

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