From the April 2004 Idaho Observer:

Depleted Uranium deaths could surpass worst-case predictions

by Amy Worthington

The Pentagon has just announced that 18,000 American troops were medically evacuated from Iraq during the first year of operations there. Thousands more have been sickened and maimed in Afghanistan since 2001. No one knows how many U.S. troops have actually died in these two quagmires, because the Pentagon cooks the books by listing the not quite dead as “wounded,” conveniently excluding them from the death count when they do die.

There are now two bills pending in our graft-ridden Congress to authorize mandatory national service obligation for both young men and women. These are HB163 and S89. Reinstatement of the draft is not feasible until after the November elections.

Meantime, as the war/occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan grinds on, military recruiters are frantically mining high schools and colleges across the nation for new cannon fodder. Under provisions of G.W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, recruiters have access to names, addresses and phone numbers of all American high school juniors and seniors.

The Associated Press explains that these hapless kids are being seduced to the killing fields with hot rod races, trendy ads and online games. When a recruiter excites the immature with his laptop game “Powerpoint Rangers,” you can bet these devious psychological tools show kids neither the horrors of missing limbs nor the after effects of depleted uranium.

No American kid should sign on the military's disingenuous dotted line before reading a new book by Dennis Kyne, former Army air medic in the 18th Airborne Corps during Gulf War I. This easy-read book, despite a few expletives, should be a basic primer in all American high schools. It is guaranteed to give kids a perspective on the realities of the atomic battlefields to which Washington has been sending American troops since 1991.

Kyne comes from a family with a proud military heritage, but his experiences in Gulf War I revealed that the military structure as it exists today is not what it claims to be. He describes the filthy living conditions, lies, corruption and incompetence that continually put our young troops in harms way.

He confirms the military's despicable treatment of vets when they return to the United States decimated from disease, battlefield toxins, vaccines and radiation. Desperately needing adequate medical testing and care, they are abused with games and denials from a callous establishment determined to escape responsibility and save money.

The fact that America deliberately creates and arms the enemies it will fight later is not lost on Kyne. He notes that the United States sent $1.6 billion in arms and high tech equipment to Saddam and that one U.S. shipment landed in Iraq just one day before the U.S. went to war against him in 1991. Kyne says, “Much like the casinos in Las Vegas that give you money to get you started at the black-jack table, we were giving Iraq the weapons to get a war started.”

This is why Corporate America, including Dick Cheney's gluttonous Halliburton, Inc., now growing tick-fat from ongoing Middle Eastern conflagrations, has continued to supply Saddam into the late 1990s.

Kyne illustrates the incredible disinformation to which both the American public and U.S. forces are continuously plied to stampede the U.S. into perpetual war so lucrative for corporate warmongers. He says, “As citizens we were told that our mission was to save Kuwait and so we voiced our support of intervention without knowing the truths of the war. We did not know that the Kuwaiti girl speaking before the U.S. Senate, about atrocious things Iraqi soldiers had done, was the Emir of Kuwait's niece, lying profusely. We did not know that the oil fields of Kuwait and Southern Iraq were set ablaze by our own forces.”

What worked for father George, worked for son W. Thus America has been abused with the 9-11 and WMD scams, costing a bankrupt America $3.7 billion a month in Iraq and $900 million a month in Afghanistan.

Kyne's most shocking revelation is that 75 percent of U.S. Desert Storm casualties in 1991 were caused by friendly fire, a fact he says is confirmed by an MIT study. Considering a recent media report about marines being strafed with depleted uranium by a U.S. A-10 in Nasiriyah, Iraq, this comment by Kyne hits home:

“Combat fight badges are awarded to officers when they obtain combat flight hours .... commanders would get up and lose their minds in the sand storms.

“Lacking any points of reference or terrain recognition skill, these officers flew with no knowledge as to where they were going, or which side the enemy was on... Most [on the ground] cried into the transmitter and started picking their own troops out of the sand while they pissed themselves in fear..... It became who gets who first between the United States and itself.”

Kyne, who like hundreds of thousands of Gulf War I vets, suffers from Gulf War Syndrome, describes the horrendous depleted uranium exposure endured by U.S. troops during and after the three-day ground war of Desert Storm.

U.S. air forces had spent 45 days contaminating Kuwait and Iraqi territory with depleted uranium weaponry into which our ground forces were then forced to march. Kyne tells potential military recruits, “It is time for the world to know that the United States military is using young soldiers for guinea pigs, not defenders of the constitution.”

Kyne's excellent web site is DennisKyne.com. It contains graphic pictures of radiation-melted Iraqi bodies, demonstrating the horrific effects of U.S. nuclear weaponry now used routinely and illegally in foreign nations for the aggrandizement of the amoral U.S. defense industry.

Kyne's book and an 8-minute video are only $10 plus $2 shipping. The book is gripping and easy read. The video brings home the message of battlefield radiation that has killed thousands of U.S. troops and which will continue to poison hundreds of thousands more. This is a great package for informing friends and family. If any young person you know is contemplating military suicide, give him or her this book and video and consider it an investment in America's future.

Write Denis Kyne at PO Box 720254, San Jose, CA 95172