The puzzle starts with all of the experimental drugs and vaccines that we were ordered to take without our knowledge or consent. Protocols weren't followed starting from here, Canada, with mass inoculations that were not documented in one's yellow book—the vaccination book—to arriving on the battlefield and being ordered to take nerve agent pills, and ones for anthrax, botulism, toxoids and the plague. It was to counterattack nerve agents and biological warfare.
Then there are all of the environmental exposures one is exposed to regardless of where you are, in my case as a nurse dealing with casualties' contaminated uniforms, or where Sean was. He may have been far removed from where I was, but desert winds blow a lot of stuff around, so you don't necessarily have to be in the immediate vicinity to be exposed or contaminated by something like vehicles, ammunitions and depleted uranium.
When I speak candidly about my wards, imagine a big, giant sandbox, and instead of toys for the kids, there are tanks and soldiers, and you get the Scuds and other missiles, tanks, planes, bombs and then oil-well fires. You're getting exposed to all of that. You don't have the luxury of taking a bubble bath at the end of your day. You go days and days without water, without showering. You're wearing this toxic, contaminated clothing on you with no hope of getting clean. You survive this.
Canada—which was shocking—was one of the only countries that I witnessed packing up all our equipment and bringing it home with us. The Americans just left all their stuff there, and when they did choose to bring something back, they had decontamination teams take care of decontaminating either the vehicle, tent or whatever they felt was precious enough to bring home with them. But Canada...?
When the receiving end is here, the poor guys who are working in logistics have never been over there, but they're receiving all of these contaminated goods back, so they're getting secondary exposures, and the puzzle becomes huge.
With that, illnesses have happened. Some are defined and some are not quite so defined. Some are clear-cut and some aren't, and some are immediate. Some people got sick immediately. Other people may have delayed reactions. It's like, why can I not eat a shrimp because it might kill me or I may have an allergic reaction, but you can go to the seafood buffet, help yourself and you're fine? We're all different. Everybody is different, but with the military, it's one-size-fits-all.
I was inoculated for anthrax, which I reacted terribly to, and it was so bad that I had to have shoulder surgery because it destroyed all my muscle tissues and everything in my shoulder. Why me and not Sean? The thing is that it doesn't matter if I was injecting a 95 pound female or a 250 pound guy. It was the same dosage. Something's going to go wrong. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand this.
We're sent anywhere in the world, and trust me and Sean, we're sent to the worst hell-holes in the world. Someone has to do the dirty business of a nation, and we're the ones, and we do it.
All we want in return is when we come home, if we need help, please help us. Don't question us. Don't make us justify our needs. Don't make us beg for crumbs, and then have to justify and appeal all of this. Before we're even sent anywhere, we have a full medical and dental check, we see a psychologist. We're checked from head to toe. You can't have a cavity. You're checked everywhere to make sure that you're not going to become a problem on that mission. How dare our country, when we come home and we're in need, especially, when you've sent us basically as lab rats—experimental everything—and then we come home, and it might not be black and white.... Things might not be diagnosed, and then, yes, finally, thank God for the Americans and the British and Australians, where they do have medically unexplained illnesses, presumptive illnesses, because they've affected every single part of the body. It depends on what the toxicity is. It could have been from the injection, from the pyridostigmine bromide, the Norwegian pill. It could have been from depleted uranium. It could have been from the burn pits. It doesn't matter what mission you're on, the burn pits are everywhere.
We say one man, one kit. When you leave, you have one duffle bag. That's your life. When you're on mission somewhere, you have to burn your garbage. You have to take care of it. Well, that is toxic. We burn anything from amputated limbs from the operating room to waste in the latrines, to food. Whatever is of waste is burnt.