By Rupert Nuttle
He was 26 years old in December 1990, a recent graduate of the Royal Military College, when he was shipped from Cold Lake, Alberta to Doha, Qatar. Now in his fifties, retired Captain Sean Bruyea has struggled for two and a half decades with Gulf War syndrome.
He’s not alone. The illness has affected hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans worldwide, but still goes unrecognized by the Canadian government.
“They’re still highly dismissive of it,” says Bruyea, who speaks regularly before Parliamentary Committees on Veterans Affairs, and has published more than 30 articles promoting the welfare of disabled soldiers and veterans.
“It’s really just a tragic, sad litany of bureaucratic and government failures over the years,” he says, adding that the government’s response has been “completely ineffectual and insensitive.”
About 4,500 Canadians were deployed to the Middle East between 1990 and 1991 in the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. Some started coming forward in the mid-1990s, complaining of chronic fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and lapses in memory and concentration, among other physical and psychological symptoms.
The causes are thought to be exposure to environmental toxins – such as oil-well gas fires, pesticides and depleted uranium – as well as a host of military-issued vaccines and medications that were administered to soldiers at the time of deployment.
A recent report from the American Institute of Medicine confirms that as many as one in three veterans deployed to the Persian Gulf theatre are still plagued by the multi-symptom illness today. In Canada, the medical research has been less conclusive. A government report from 2005 suggests that the illness “cannot be linked to an identifiable cause,” and goes on to mention that the same symptoms are also found among civilians and non-deployed military personnel.
When asked to comment for this article, Veterans Affairs wrote in an email: “Gulf War Veterans are covered for any disability that arose during their service in this theatre.” According to Bruyea, it isn’t enough – those who suffer from Gulf War syndrome have had to seek treatment at their own expense, and still do. (The Department of National Defense did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Part of the problem around the government’s response has to do with the complexity of the illness, suggests Dr. Gordon Broderick, a medical researcher at Nova Southeastern University who has published numerous papers on the syndrome.
He says the thinking has changed over the years. While initially the culprit was thought to be the depleted uranium used in munitions, Broderick says the focus has shifted to the effects of government-issued medications on soldiers’ immune systems. The combination of powerful vaccines and combat stress could have made troops more vulnerable to allergens and disease, he explains.
As Bruyea tells it, “We were basically guinea pigs.” He remembers being lined up and administered with a whole slew of vaccines within the space of a day, before being loaded into Hercules aircraft and flown to the middle of the desert. Upon arrival, troops were ordered to take pyridostigmine bromide, a powerful anti-nerve gas agent, every eight hours.
And on top of the toxins and the cocktail of medications, he says the stress was “gut-wrenching.” “We were fully expecting biological and chemical weapons,” says Bruyea, “And we fully expected that people would die.” After twelve weeks, he was diagnosed with Combat Stress Reaction (an acute form of PTSD), and sent home.
There may have been no Canadian casualties in the Gulf War, but the health effects of that conflict will stick with Bruyea and many others for a lifetime.
