By J.R. MOEHRINGER TIMES STAFF WRITERYORBA LINDA--He has a
Purple Heart. It lies beneath a ragged line in the middle of his chest His
nanny coos at him as she unbuttons his cotton jumpsuit, exposing the vivid
incision made last month by a surgeon's knife. "Yes," she says softly, "he
has his own battle scars." At first, no one saw a connection between
Christian Coats' congenital birth defects and the fact that his father
fought in the Persian Gulf War. Doctors simply called it fate when the boy
was born last year with a deformed heart on the wrong side of his chest. But
when Christian's parents, Brad and Lynn Coats, learned about dozens more
abnormal babies being born to Gulf War soldiers, they couldn't help
suspecting the spate of poisons to which Brad was exposed in Kuwait. While
taking part in Operation Desert Shield, then Desert Storm, Brad Coats
breathed the black, cottony smoke of burning oil wells, stood beside
sky-high stockpiles of radioactive ammunition and ingested fistfulls of
experimental medicine meant to protect him from Iraq's chemical arsenal. Did
any or all of these hazards make him sick, or damage his sperm, as some
believe? Nearly five years since the Gulf War ended, perhaps as many as
40,000 veterans--6% of those who served--have reported mini-plague of
symptoms, from fatigue and recurrent nausea to chronic joint pain and
dizziness, all grouped loosely under the heading "Gulf War syndrome." And as
Gulf War soldiers become fathers and mothers, some say their sickness seems
to be seeping into the next generation. Defense Department officials express
deep skepticism that the brief Gulf War could create a protracted health
crisis. Pentagon officials recently concluded after a year long study that
U.S. forces were exposed to no deadly gases or chemicals, and that no unique
illness existed among veterans. But some soldiers insist that something
contaminated them, and that something seems to be maiming their children.
"Our purpose is to demonstrate to those blokes in Washington that this is a
big problem, and they better get their heads on straight," says Betty
Mekdeci, head of the Orlando-based Assn. of Birth Defect Children, which has
built a detailed database on more than 150 abnormal Gulf War babies so far,
including Christian. No one knows how many sick children have been born to
Gulf War veterans, and Mekdeci says hers is the only group trying to find
out. It was her organization that detected a number of heart defects among
Gulf War children, along with a number of babies born with a rare disease
called Goldenhar syndrome, which causes asymmetry in the head and face. But
she says the work has been slow without cooperation from the government
Until an answer is found, the Coatses say they feel consigned to an
anguished limbo. Each day, they watch Christian suffer and wonder if the
cause is natural or man-made. "When he grows up, you'd like to have an
answer for him: Why he's so screwed up, why he had to go through all the
pain," Brad Coats said. on the eve of his first birthday, Christian seems to
be recovering well from last month's open-heart surgery. still, his parents
do not know how many more birthdays their. son will enjoy, and their doctors
won't venture a guess;
The waiting room at Children's Hospital of Orange County is small and
airless, a pastel-shaded cell perforated by a pot of day-old coffee as thick
as tree sap. Brad and Lynn Coats sit on a set of pink-and-blue chairs,
staring at the walls, staring at the ceiling, staring at the clock, which
never seems to move. Lynn Coats holds a trashy paperback novel in her lap.
She has been on Page 335 for two hours. Her-husband keeps a grocery sack
stuffed with car magazines next to him, but he has yet to flip one open.
This warm September morning, Christian is undergoing a delicate operation to
strengthen the transposed and malfunctioning parts of his heart. Down the
road, when he is stronger, doctors will try to virtually rebuild the organ.
At 9 a.m., the hospital's head cardiac nurse appears in the waiting room.
Brad blurts: "Do they have him split open?" The nurse blaniches at the
question; She doesn't know that he is a former Army mechanic, the kind of
man who likes to roll up his sleeves and-get down inside the nitty-gritty of
things. She doesn't know that he stays up nights, drawing elaborate color
pictures of his son's heart an the family computer. "Yes," she says quietly,
"they have him split open." When Coats asks another graphic question about
the state of his sons chest. Lynn gives him a look that says, Enough, Brad,
Lynn is crustier and feistier today than when she married Brad six years
ago. Tragedy has toughened her. Besides Christian's ordeal, she had to
endure those long winter nights in 1991, watching on CNN as warning sirens
rent the air above the Persian Gulf. The alarms were constant and each one
supposedly signaled another chemical attack Defense Department officials now
Say nearly all those sirens were false alarms, a thought that makes Lynn
laugh. Not long ago, Lynn read in the newspaper about a North Carolina woman
named Melanie Ayers, who was forging a network of Gulf War parents and
pressing Pentagon officials for the truth about Gulf War illnesses besides
Ayers' infant son, Michael who died from a congenital heart defect, the
article described several abnormal and premature babies born to Gulf War
veterans, including a little girl named Grace burton whose heart troubles
were reminiscent of Christian's. frightened, desperate for information Lynn
wrote Ayers a heartfelt letter, asking about Grace and describing all 'that
she and Brad had been through. if we can finally solve this issue, she
wrote, "it would ease my husband's burden. He feels it's his fault that our
son is in his condition weeks later Ayers answered Lynns letter, expressing
sympathy and solidarity. Thank God your son's life was saved she wrote,
explaining that Lynns letter had touched her deeply because Christian had
nearly been the name of her own son. Above all, Ayers wrote to deliver some
bad news. Days earlier, she said, "Grace had slipped into the Lords arms."
Brad had a funny feeling about those pills. He asked if he could skip
taking them, but his lieutenant told him to shut the hell up. "He said,
"This isn't a [expletive] democracy, " Brad recalls. After months of careful
thought 'Brad and Lynn now believe those Army-issued pills probably caused
their son's birth defects. "The whole time we were over there, I was
thinking there was something up with these pills,' Brad says. "It would've
been one thing if they said, 'Here's a drug we don't know what it could do,
it's experimental, it could save your life, take it.' " Instead, the Army
said nothing and their silence made Brad nervous. The pills were tiny, white
and nondescript--like swollen grains of rice. Brad's lieutenant never
explained what was in them, they called them "PB," short for pyridostigmine
bromide, and ordered Brad to take one every six hours for a month, promising
they would protect him if Iraq ever launched a chemical attack. Brad thought
about hiding then under his tongue, or keeping one to take home, in case he
ever wanted to have it analyzed. Throughout the war, he worried about being
shot, but he also fretted about the long-term effects of that pill.he was
right to worry. Normally reserved for sufferers of myasthenia gravis, a
chronic neuromuscular disorder, PB had never been subjected to a full-scale
battery of tests on healthy human beings. Until the Gulf War, that is, when
it was tested on hundreds of thousands of unwitting soldiers. Documents
released by the Pentagon earlier this year show that officials--anxious for
something, anything, to protect U.S. soldiers from Iraqi nerve
gases--pressured the Food and Drug Administration to authorize experimental
use of PB without soldiers' informed consent. Brad learned about PB's
experimental nature, and its many worrisome side effects, only after the
war--and then only through news reports, Senate inquiries and Lynn's dogged
research. The knowledge sickens him I more than the drug ever did. "The more
I read, .the madder I get," he says. Politicians, meanwhile, are lining up
to excoriate Pentagon officials for what they say was shoddy handling of an
unknown drug in the field Besides keeping records of. who took the drug--and
giving the same dose to each soldier, regard less of gender weight or
medical history-officials may have boosted PB's toxicity by issuing it in
tandem with a common household insecticide. The bug spray was meant to ward
off swarms of desert 'pests; instead it may have combined with PB to create
a powerful chemical compound that often proves lethal to laboratory insects
and rats. "You've got 400,000 people who ate this pill, and a lot of them
are complaining of birth defects," says James Moss, a former researcher with
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who contends he has been ostracized by
the government-dependent scientific community because of his pointed remarks
about PB. "There's a little too much coincidence." Moss testified not long
ago before a Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on the hazards of military
research. But even before he spoke, the committee's chairman, j Sen. John D.
(Jay) Rockefeller IV i (D-W.Va.), opened the hearing by blasting Pentagon
officials, who "threw caution to the winds, ignoring all warnings of
potential harm, and gave these drugs to hundreds of thousands of soldiers
with virtually no warnings and no safeguards." later, Dr. Edward Martin, an
assistant secretary of defense, defended the Pentagon's actions. "We were
facing an enemy who (had used nerve gas before," Martin i said "and we had
every reason to believe that they had integrated the use of nerve gas and
biologic weapons into their combat arms. There was a very strong feeling
(that we had hundreds of thousands of troops who most likely would face
chemical and possible biologic weapons." Whether or not PB turns out to be
the root cause of his son's birth defect, Brad feels betrayed. He
acknowledges that Gulf War syndrome might be "mass hysteria," or else a
cluster of real illnesses caused by unforeseen factors, like smoke from
burning oils wells, contamination from uranium rich ammunition, or something
1 sinister released into the air by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Still,
the thought of those little white pills makes.him seethe. "You always assume
there's a. risk involved with going to war, could come back hurt, or dead.
You don't assume it could happen to your kids." He holds out his hands
extends them towards Christian whose blue eyes are enveloped in pouches of
baby fat when he smiles at his father. "I'm like 'Wait a minute, this wasn't
part of the deal,"' Brad says. I went into this knowing what I was willing
to give up, knowing what the risks were. And this is not something I
would've accepted as a risk."
one observes a perfect, monastic silence. When someone does talk, it is
usually about the gulf War. "I wanted to keep one of the pills and bring it
back," Brad is saying. "I was thinking something like this might happen."
Lynn's mother and sister listen intently, then look away. After four hours,
Christian's doctor appears. Still wearing his surgical gown, he pronounces
Christian's heart strong and says the chances of repairing it are good. Brad
asks, straight out, how long Christian can live with a rebuilt heart on the
wrong side of his chest. Frowning, the doctor says he does not know Later in
the day, Brad and lynn will see Christian, and it will break their hearts to
find that he seems angry with them, almost resentful that they let this
happen to him. But for now, they sit quietly, immobilized by relief. They
stare at the floor, they stare at the ceiling, they stare at the clock,
which never moves. "Take a deep breath," Bred's mother says. "The hard part
is over. But in a far corner of the waiting room, Lynn's mother strikes a
less hopeful tone. "That walnut-sized heart," she says, her voice trailing
off, "beating in that little baby . . . "
