Exposed: Burn Pits May Force the Military to Acknowledge Generations of Poisoned Veterans
August 12, 2021| Sonner Kehrt
On a late spring day in 1945, a boyish-looking 17-year-old reported to the Naval Station Great Lakes, just north of Chicago. His name was James Ryals, but everyone called him by his middle name, Jerry. Jerry had been so eager to serve that he’d gotten permission from both his parents and his principal to leave high school early to join the Navy.
But just a few weeks after reporting in, Ryals found himself in the sick bay. The diagnosis was “pharyngitis”—a severe sore throat, fever, and congestion that kept him in the hospital for almost two weeks. That’s what his medical records say, but Ryals told his son Jay years later that he also remembered his skin was covered in red welts and blisters. And he remembered that he wasn’t alone in the sick bay. His entire company was there with him, suffering from the same symptoms.
Later that summer, when he was home on leave, he ended up back at a naval hospital with the same problems. Then, two years later, after he’d been discharged, he put on an old uniform from that summer, and the blisters reappeared. Other health problems followed: chronic bronchitis and low blood oxygen levels, chronic kidney disease. He lost his senses of smell and taste during basic training and never got them back. One of Jay Ryals’ earliest memories was tasting the milk the milkman delivered to tell his dad whether it was sour.
https://thewarhorse.org/military-poisoned-toxic-exposure-burn-pits-secret-testing/
