His research stalled due to lack of evidence and Pentagon documentation, and he put his work in a drawer until Chivers came to him on the same subject.
Ismay couldn’t satisfy what he calls a “morbid curiosity” about the origins of the chemical weapons found in Iraq. “I have found time and again that veterans talk to me because I was a Marine.” Ismay calls him Chris, but for seven years ending in 1994, he was Captain Chivers, a Marine infantry officer who served in the Gulf War. Chivers, the paper’s longtime conflict and arms reporter who wrote the piece. In most cases for troops wounded by chemical weapons in Iraq, that documentation was aggressively avoided.Īs Ismay finished his service commitment with the Navy in 2010, he read a New York Times piece detailing the complex origins of weapons found inside a Taliban gun locker.
Lifelong medical care will likely be necessary for the troops exposed, but that will be difficult in the Veterans Affairs system, which requires documentation to treat and compensate service-related injuries. Purple Hearts awarded by Army Secretary Pete Geren were rescinded in one case due to convoluted rules of what defines enemy action with chemical weapons. troops, and official recognition is nearly nonexistent. High-ranking officials reportedly engaged in subterfuge to downplay and conceal the danger to U.S. The Pentagon, later prompted by the story, revealed the number wounded as higher than 600. and Iraqi forces had secretly recovered about 5,000 chemical weapons during the eight-year war, with the first report documenting 17 American and seven Iraqi soldiers injured by mustard and nerve agents-including the only documented battlefield exposures to a nerve agent in U.S. What they uncovered was astonishing: U.S.
Chivers, and videographer Mac William Bishop-whose own service played a considerable part in reporting one of the biggest untold stories of the Iraq War. At the center was a team of three veterans-Ismay, New York Times correspondent C.J. The landmark two-year New York Times investigation on the Iraq War’s secret chemical weapons casualties sits at the intersection of multiple daunting obstacles for journalists: military leaders who suppressed information from the public, injured war veterans who are skeptical of reporters, and dense webs of technical details in need of expert analysis. Yet at the same time, Iraqi and American soldiers recovered thousands of chemical munitions mostly in secret for three years before Ismay deployed to Iraq, leaving his troops and countless others to a grim lottery of sorting through damaged shells that might have led to paralysis by sharing the same air. Chemical weapons like nerve agents and mustard were an afterthought when improvised explosives were the number-one killer of troops in Iraq.
He put in long hours at operations centers, studying reports and looking for patterns set by insurgent bomb-makers to help soldiers find IEDs with their eyes and not their bodies. Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, Ismay spent a lot of time thinking about the improvised explosives killing coalition troops. “I never heard about guys who got hit by mustard and sarin.”Īs a U.S. “I was amazed I was never told about M-110 rounds before I got there,” Ismay says, referring to the chemical artillery rounds manufactured to produce a toxic effect on personnel and to contaminate habitable areas. His first week there introduced him to an open secret: Coalition forces routinely found chemical weapons, and within a month, a soldier in his unit suffered a mustard blister on his leg the size of his hand. John Ismay was in the business of tracking explosives and bombs in surge-era Iraq.