A silent killer is stalking veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan
Cancer strikes GWOT vets at rates that recall Agent Orange. We’re not doing enough to support them.
ETHAN BROWN | FEBRUARY 1, 2024
On Dec. 9, the Air Force special operations community mourned Alan Yoshida, a combat controller who deployed with an Army Special Forces team into Afghanistan in the first days of the Global War on Terror in 2001. Yoshida, who spent years recovering from wounds sustained in an errant bomb strike, is remembered for developing safety technologies to protect his close air support colleagues. But he could not escape the silent killer that stalks so many GWOT veterans: cancer.
Yoshida’s story is far too common. While I was recently interviewing combat veterans for a forthcoming history on the War on Terror, two other service members from a small sample of sources notified me that they too were battling cancer: a British soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan spent this year undergoing treatment for lymphoma, and a German Army air controller with multiple Afghanistan rotations had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
In fact, combat veterans of the post-9/11 wars are disproportionately affected by cancer. When the War on Terror officially ended on December 31, 2022, the Pentagon’s official count noted 3,965 U.S. service members had been killed in direct combat, while a further 1,180 died in incidents not directly related to combat (accidents, suicides, illnesses, and injuries). In total, our nation’s longest war claimed 5,145 service members, an average of 257 per year.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2024/02/silent-killer-stalking-veterans-iraq-and-afghanistan/393831/
