Podcast (GW-E01): “We were sick as dogs” – Dennis Kyne, Gulf War vet

Transcript

Dennis Kyne:
We got up there, we were sick as dogs, people were tipping over, so they got us home, but there was a whole nother group of American soldiers that went in there to clean up the battlefield before the cameras got there. Those soldiers are the ones who actually got the sickest from breathing in the particles. They got internalized radiation.

Matthew Breems:
This is the Courage to Resist podcast. Since 2005, Courage to Resist has worked to support military resistance to illegal and unjust wars, counter recruitment, draft resistance, and the policies of empire. My name is Matthew Breems.

Matthew Breems:
Former Gulf War medic Dennis Kyne is the episode’s guest. As a medic, Dennis became increasingly concerned with military personnel’s exposure to toxic chemicals and depleted uranium. As Dennis did further study on depleted uranium, he became a vocal activist and educator. He has traveled and lectured extensively on what became known as Gulf War Syndrome.

Matthew Breems:
Dennis, thanks for joining us from New Orleans today. I’m looking forward to our conversation. I know your story of activism’s different than many that it is coming out of the first Persian Gulf War. Why don’t we start off with a little bit about you. Just give us some background on Dennis.

Dennis Kyne:
Yeah. I grew up in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the beast of disposable income. Ever since I was born, really, there was people around that were so rich, I’d get a pair of socks and a tee shirt for Christmas and they’d get a motorcycle. When it came time to decide, I was getting out of high school and I wanted to go to college, I wasn’t overly academic or anything, but I didn’t have any money for the college, so I bought off on the Army GI bill and the Army College Fund and enlisted when I was 17 years old.

Matthew Breems:
So, it was purely just an economic move for you.

Dennis Kyne:
Purely. Purely. Yeah.

Matthew Breems:
You weren’t idealistic any sort of way.

Dennis Kyne:
I had no notions, I had no idea that… I watched the commercials. Be all you can be was the theme. Every morning, when you were watching whatever, you’d see, “Army. Be all you can be. We do more before 9:00 than most people do all day.” That was the advertising, that was the medium I was watching, was that you go in the military, they say you learn a vocation. You could learn a vocation, get out and have a job, which nine out of 10 that never happens for. You could go in the military, use your GI bill and get the Army College Fund, and nine times out of 10, the soldier never uses that either. The Army College Fund and the GI bill are the least used government benefits that are ever given to a soldier.

Dennis Kyne:
I figured that my bet was I was either going to have a skill or I was going to go to college. That was my bet, so I became a medic. I went in and they taught me how to do CPR, shoot IVs, and take care of heat casualties and be an army medic. So I thought I had a nice play. I thought I was going to do okay no matter what happened. I’d get out, I could be a paramedic, or I could get out and I could go to college. So I really felt like I was a sharp kid making a wise choice.

Matthew Breems:
About what time was this happening for you, that you joined the army?

Dennis Kyne:
That was 1987. I was a senior in high school.

Matthew Breems:
Okay. So, we fast forward a few years. It’s 1990. Things are heating up in the Middle East. Kuwait gets invaded. Where are you as far as your commitment with the military?

Dennis Kyne:
Well, December of 1989 was the Panama invasion, so we were on Fort Benning for that. I didn’t deploy with them, but I saw that craziness. Then, that following summer is when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We are the first unit off of Fort Benning. The first battalion, 34th Medical Battalion, is deployed to Saudi Arabia immediately in August. We become, basically, the front line of the base camps and moving everybody forward to the front line of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Dennis Kyne:
I got there in August of 1990 and we stayed in Cement City. Before we had deployed in that August, this is how fast that happened, they injected us with vaccines, anthrax and vaccines that were loaded with squalene. Squalene’s an adjutant that’s supposed to speed up the process of the vaccination. We were sick as dogs. We got on these planes and flew over to Saudi Arabia. We were vomiting and diarrhea-ing all the way there.

Dennis Kyne:
After you get vaccines, you’re supposed to lay down in bed for a couple of days. They put us on planes and sent us over to the Middle East where we sat in a place called Cement City. It was an old cement factory. The reason we had to sit there was because all of our vehicles were on ships and we were there waiting for them, so we waited there for months, man, it seemed. It was probably like six weeks, but we were there and a lot of people got exposed to heavy metals and cement particles that we were breathing in. That was when we got our vehicles, and then we started moving forward. So we were already all beat up physically before we ever started our move to the front line.

Dennis Kyne:
Somewhere in October, November, we start moving forward a little bit. As you’re moving through these camps and we’re setting them up, what they do is they lay down insecticides and herbicides all over the scene, so that’s what you’re going to set your camp up in. The rodents and the vipers over there, they’re all poisonous, nothing’s going to survive in the desert if it’s not poisonous, so they were buying insecticides, herbicides and pesticides. They were buying it off the black market in the Middle East and just spraying it all over the place, and we were walking into that all day. We were all sick from the vaccines, the food, and the heavy metal particles, and then we start walking through herbicides and pesticides and we’re really getting wiped out.

Dennis Kyne:
Then, as we move a little bit further forward, there’s this fear of a chemical war, so the United States Army issued all the soldiers a box of PB tablets, which were pyridostigmine bromide tablets. Bromide’s like rat poison itself, but they were supposed to close off our synapses so if we ingested a chemical attack, the synapses themselves would block off our nerves from being ripped through. It was crazy. It was made in Holland and it had never been FDA approved. We were basically Guinea pigs. I projectile vomited immediately from eating them, so I stopped eating them, but some of the soldiers were so afraid they said, “Doc, let me eat yours.” Man, some of these kids ate three packs of these things, so they were eating, basically, rat poison and they got brain damage.

Dennis Kyne:
Then the war started and we bombed them for 45 days with depleted uranium from January 17th till late February, and then we went ahead and walked into the uranium we had just bombed. So you’re talking about a human being that had been vaccinated way back in the US, gone through all that human exposure and being basically tested on, and then walked into a radio active battlefield. That was when people just started tipping over like cheap suits and they got us out of there and flew us home on commercial aircraft like TWA.

Matthew Breems:
Explain for some people that aren’t familiar with the depleted uranium. Why was that even in the field of operations there?

Dennis Kyne:
Depleted uranium is a byproduct, basically, of the nuclear industry, if you will. The depleted uranium is non-fissionable. The plutonium that is made out of uranium is fissionable. Uranium has what’s called uranium-238, and it makes up most of what uranium is. There’s a couple of percentages of what they call the radioactive… the nuclear part of it that you can go and put into a plutonium breeder and start breeding plutonium.

Dennis Kyne:
What they did was they took the depleted uranium… It had a former name. I know we discussed the military’s love of wordsmithing. Depleted uranium had an acronym that went capital D-capital U-capital L-capital L-capital R-capital A-capital M, DULLRAM, and that meant Depleted Uranium Low-Level Radioactive Material. By the time they were using it on the battlefield, they just called it DU and took the low-level radioactive munition part off at the end of it. It’s still radioactive. Depleted uranium has got a 4.2-billion-year half-life, it’s as longer than the human experience, and it’s armor piercing so when you fire it, it’ll go through the tanks.

Matthew Breems:
So it’s an extremely dense metal that they’re using for armor-piercing rounds.

Dennis Kyne:
It is, and there are metals that’ll do the job. There are other metals that will do the job, but, remember, this is basically our radioactive waste: we’ve got to do something with it. What was interesting about that experience is the French, who later in 2003 when we reinvaded would say things like, “That stuff you sent over there was killing our troops”… If you look at the historical context of all these years we’ve been in Iraq, only one country supported us on the reinvasion in 2003 and that was Poland. No other country backed us up when we reinvaded Iraq in ’03 because their soldiers had all been exposed to the uranium too and they knew it, and they weren’t going to put their soldiers back over on that battlefield again. The whole international community was well aware that we were slopping our radioactive waste all over the place.

Dennis Kyne:
But the fact of the matter is the United States Army, guys like Colonel Daxon, will say that low-level radioactivity is not harmful to the human experience and that low-level radiation comes in lower than background radiation. It’s radioactive. It doesn’t come in lower than background radiation, it comes in in addition to background radiation, so now you have background radiation and depleted-uranium radiation together. Not one’s lower than the other; they’re together now. It’s an insane logic they use.

Dennis Kyne:
Then what they’ll tell you is that you can just put a piece of paper in between you and a uranium particle. This is the big kicker here. It emits alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Gamma radiation is the radiation that comes out and irradiates your chromosomes externally from the outside in like a microwave oven. That’s why you don’t wear a pacemaker near a microwave, because it emits that, it’s just not radioactive. The microwave isn’t radioactive, but it’s emitting high energy and that energy aberrates the chromosomes and alters the cellular makeup of a human being.

Dennis Kyne:
What happened was the dust from the bombs. When the bomb goes off, it leaves radioactive particles. They call it the particulate effect. The particles are so small they go down to submicron levels. You can’t even see them without a submicron microscope, which I think Stanford University and the big Ivy Leagues are the guys that have them. Most universities can’t even afford one of them. When you get down to that level, those particles were going through anybody’s protective masks they were wearing out there as well.

Dennis Kyne:
So, we all left. Remember, we got up there, we were sick as dogs, people were tipping over, so they got us home, but there was a whole nother group of American soldiers that went in there to clean up the battlefield before the cameras got there. Those soldiers are the ones who actually got the sickest from breathing in the particles. They got internalized radiation; different than external radiation, it’s in your body. So, when they’re saying you can take a piece of paper and put it in between one of these particles and block the radiation from it, once that particle gets down into your lung, it doesn’t have a piece of paper in there to protect you from it, so it’s just beating radiation with a 4.2-billion-year half-life.

Dennis Kyne:
It aberrates a chromosome or it aberrates a cell, and then you have mother cells and daughter cells, so your daughter cell is basically created with aberrated from the mother cell. Then the radiation is also hitting the aberrated daughter cell, so you basically have genetic mutations. Life magazine covered it. They put the cover story. It says, “The tiny victims of Desert Storm.” It’s got JC on there, little boy from the soldier, and he’s got no arms; he’s all mutated. We were birthing mutated babies in the ’90s and Life magazine was covering it, but the government made them pull all that stuff.

Matthew Breems:
Was this something you were realizing while it was happening, you’re seeing these different symptoms in the soldiers, or is this all kind of coming after the fact; you’re putting two and two together?

Dennis Kyne:
Well, I’ll tell you this, man. We had guys whose skin melted down to their bones, no joke, in Martin Army Community Hospital in Fort Benning. We were told that somehow a flesh-eating virus must’ve been the cause of it from the desert, a flesh-eating virus, but it would be years later when I put two and two together. You know what I’m saying? When it was happening, they didn’t even mention depleted uranium. Most soldiers, even now, over there will go, “I never heard of it.” It’s not as if we were ever aware then.

Dennis Kyne:
The tragic thing about the depleted uranium is it has more than one use. It’s not just used in the bombs, it’s also used in the M1A1 Abrams tank because, that dense metal, it’ll protect anything from piercing it as well. It’s through the roof. Tankers dying and they never even really had anything to be afraid of, and it was their tank that caused their cancers.

Matthew Breems:
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Matthew Breems:
Okay, back to today’s episode.

Matthew Breems:
Your tour over there ended and you had come back home, but you’re still part of the military. What started to take place that really made you start to become an activist and a war resistor?

Dennis Kyne:
Well, I’ll tell you. The first alarming thing that happened to me in that area, we got the George Bush–Al Gore election of 2000. You have the Supreme Court making a decision that was totally un-American. That’s not the way politics works. You don’t elect a president on a Supreme Court decision. My awareness turned right then in 2000. I wasn’t really into war, of course, but what I really became was very politicized. I was like, “Whoa. We just had our democracy stolen.” I got very, very aware then, and, by the time that it happened again in ’04, I was on the scene. I was out there in the world in ’03. Back in ’03, I had already started moving because…

Dennis Kyne:
When George Bush stole the election and then reinvaded Iraq, I went nuts because we were done in Iraq. We had finished up in Iraq in 1991. While, although, we put sanctions on them and did Operation Northern Watch and Operation Southern Watch and Operation Desert Fox way before ’03, it was the stealing of the democracy and the reinvasion of Iraq by George Bush, Jr. that was what really fired me up. That’s where the hijacking of America started. That was the setup for Trump, way back then.

Matthew Breems:
Okay. What did your activism look like at that time, then?

Dennis Kyne:
Remember this. Now, remember this, man. I still didn’t know what depleted uranium was in 2000, either. I didn’t even know that depleted uranium was the cause of the death of my guys until I started to become active and go out and protest the invasion of Iraq. So that’s what my first action was, was to go out and protest the invasion of Iraq in San Francisco. It might’ve been before March 17th because that’s the day they invaded, so I’m thinking March 3rd or something. They held the biggest rally ever in San Francisco. There was like 300,000 people out there. I was trying to get local in the local Peace Center and getting up there in San Francisco. International ANSWER was hot back then.

Dennis Kyne:
Then that was the day. That same day they had that huge protest I was handing pictures out of melted human beings that I had taken in Iraq from the depleted uranium. This guy looked at it and he goes, “Whoa!” He goes, “That’s what the depleted uranium did, huh?” I go, “What? What’s that?” He goes, “Oh, man, you don’t know about it? Then you got to learn about it.”

Dennis Kyne:
Well, here’s the kicker: one of my childhood friends, [Nelan McFetridge 00:15:44], who’s a Yugoslavian, he knew what it was. He’s not even a soldier, but they had used depleted uranium all over Yugoslavia. We used the NATO forces to bomb Yugoslavian, and we used depleted uranium. It was one of my best friends’ little brothers, who was like three or four years younger than me, who’s the one who educated me on the uranium. That all started the day I basically stepped out in the streets to protest the reinvasion of Iraq.

Dennis Kyne:
Well, there’s two things that have to happen. I have a college degree and I’m pretty smart, I guess, but I didn’t know nothing about… I didn’t take chemistry or any of those classes, man. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was the result, which most people have no idea. I was in there reading Chemistry For Idiots in the bookstore and I was just trying to figure out how I could establish some credibility to understand the subject. I understood what the result was from the subject, but I didn’t really understand how we got to using this munition.

Dennis Kyne:
So I spent a lot of time. I hung out with Doug Rokke. He was basically a major in the army, and he was on the depleted uranium study team. I hung out with Leuren Moret. She’s a geoscientist. She knew all kinds of stuff. She took me out to the Lawrence Livermore Lab. A lot of it was studying and writing. I’d write a lot of articles. I wrote a lot of articles, and then I started going out and speaking. I’d speak and write an article, speak and write an article, and I just kept doing that until I was basically the subject-matter expert, if you will, out on the road. I’d get picked up in a documentary like Beyond Treason or Soldiers Speak Out or something like that. I just really became the voice of the depleted uranium from experiential knowledge, having watched what happened. Just being too young and not really knowing what it was, but I was able to articulate it.

Dennis Kyne:
I spent years out there, right in front of university professors with PhDs from Union College, the home of the radiation, and nobody could ever disprove what I was telling them. Like I said, they buried the Life article, but you can’t disprove what I’m saying. That sure was never ever done.

Matthew Breems:
The soldiers’ exposure to DU and all the other chemicals and pesticides over there, that cocktail of chemicals was collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome, or the effects of it is known as Gulf War Syndrome. What has the official response been to Gulf War Syndrome?

Dennis Kyne:
Well, the later days, these clowns like Colonel Daxon and a few of them have even stated back then, back when it was a hot topic, there’s no such thing as Gulf War Syndrome. One of the things they did to us was they started giving us benefits. Here’s the deal: I got tested for ionizing radiation twice by Dr. George [inaudible 00:18:31] at the VA, so they have an ionizing radiation study group that I’m a part of. They’re not even denying that it’s going on. They got me and they’re just using me as a Guinea pig. That’s just Josef Mengele and what he did to the Jewish people. He was in there poking and prodding them during the Holocaust. That’s all they’re doing to us now. They got soldiers in study groups that have embedded depleted uranium fragments in their body, and they’re just studying them, leaving the embedded fragments in their body. Colonel Daxon wrote the report. I got a copy of it off amazon.com one time.

Dennis Kyne:
They’re basically trying to use us to study us to prove there’s nothing wrong with it, and they’ll say, “Well, there’s a couple of urines coming out on the bioassay, the urine samples, and there’s a little bit of uranium in there, but not enough to be harmful.” No, man, that just is unreasonable to even say that, man. The human being is the least resistant creature to radiation there is on Earth. That’s basically from the soldier’s experience. I’ve gone all the way through the VA system in it now, and I’m part of an ionizing radiation study group.

Matthew Breems:
Do you feel like there’s been any progress on that front as far as… Well, I don’t even know what progress would look like, but any positive change that you can see there?

Dennis Kyne:
No. No, the VA works like any other health insurance company: they’re trying to curb their costs. The studies are not intended to heal or treat somebody who’s been irradiated, they’re intended to disprove that there’s anything wrong with the radiation. Luckily, I never went down that road with them once I understood that. I’ve always treated myself. I really do believe you can excrete the particles once they’re in your body with the right foods and the right nutrients.

Dennis Kyne:
Linus Pauling said you could cure radiation exposure with vitamin C. He said the human being doesn’t create its own vitamin C. Well, us and the Guinea pig are the only two creatures that don’t create our own vitamin C. Vitamin C is the number one repairer of the cells, it’s what repairs the cells, so I’m a clinical-dose vitamin C guy. Matthias Rath and Linus Pauling were talking about genetic determinism is a bunch of nonsense and that you can repair your cells. I’ve been on that ever since I understood that, so almost two decades now.

Matthew Breems:
A lot of what your activism looks like is educational in nature. Do you feel like you’ve made an impact in that regard?

Dennis Kyne:
Yeah. Well, the subject matter is the one that you’re going to catch the intellectual body of people who want to talk about stuff like radiation and uranium. When I got busy, that was just what enraged me, the fact that we would that and I finally figured out how my guys died. But when we reinvaded Iraq, remember, that’s what got me motivated. I was able to use the depleted uranium subject in the Ehren Watada trial to help defend him because he refused to deploy to Iraq. He’s the only officer who did resist deployment to Iraq in ’03, and I was able to support him by saying, “Hey, man. He’s absolutely right, man. He’s walking into a radioactive battlefield. He shouldn’t go over there.”

Dennis Kyne:
I was antiwar, too. Remember, I became heavy duty an antiwar guy, not just a depleted uranium expert or whatever, but I was like, “Nah, we can’t be in war no more. We’ve gone way too far.” So one of the things I always tried to do was help this younger generation of veterans who was a little more awake than I was. They were resisting, they were like, “Man, we’re not going,” so I just tried to be a… I’m a noncommissioned officer, I got a little bit of rank, I got a big uniform that’s all decorated, so I just tried to support guys. Darrell Anderson, Camilo Mejia, and a lot of these younger IVAW guys, Michael Hoffman, Alex Ryabov, and support them and just be like, “Hey man. You’re doing the right thing, man. This is Sergeant Kyne telling you you guys are doing the right thing. Follow Lieutenant Watada, listen to what I’m saying, stay away from that place.” My real purpose was just to try to make sure nobody else got hurt too.

Matthew Breems:
What does your more recent activism look like in the last few years here?

Dennis Kyne:
One of the things that I’m really, really trying to focus on in this country is this race struggle we have. We have an incredibly rampant race situation, so I find myself always trying to be somewhere in a place where I can help white people understand what white privilege really means. It doesn’t mean you didn’t have a hard childhood. It doesn’t mean that you had a bad life and you didn’t struggle or anything like that. It just means that you’re lucky you’re white. My father told me that when I was a kid. He [inaudible 00:23:11] Sacramento. He said, “I went to Chicago one time, son, and I’m telling you, man, you’re lucky you’re white. So don’t ever think you’re better than nobody, but just remember you’re lucky.”

Dennis Kyne:
That’s what the privilege is. The privilege is that you’re lucky just by the fact that you got some white skin on you. If you’re down here where I am right now in New Orleans… and there’s a race situation that just can’t get cleaned up, so there’s just some things that we’ve been to have to get in touch with as a civilization. Most people are just drunk on prosperity. They just want to get out there and have a lot of fun, and the next generation is going to curse us, man, if we do not get in front of how we’re going to act as a community and how we’re going to address these environmental concerns.

Dennis Kyne:
War is the most destructive thing to the environment, so I’m antiwar. In our environment, the glaciers will probably be gone before you and I are dead, and we might not even be able to go outside for more than a couple hours a day in our lifetime if we do not get on top of this stuff.

Matthew Breems:
Well, Dennis, thank you so much for taking time to share your activism on the podcast. Really interesting insight and information into the whole DU debacle the military is taking part of, so thank you for sharing that.

Dennis Kyne:
You bet, my man. I’m glad you called and I appreciate talking to you.

Matthew Breems:
This podcast is a Courage to Resist production recorded and edited by Matthew Breems with special thanks to executive producer Jeff Paterson. Visit couragetoresist.org for more information and to offer your support.