DATELINES
Davis, Dave & Flaherty, Francis & Davidson, Osha & Komisar, Lucy
DATELINES A Room Without a View DAYTON, OHIO The administrative personnel office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base medical center is like many other offices on many other military...
...The incident Wingo disclosed was serious...
...And that's a state of affairs that bothers conservatives in Washington and NATO...
...He knew the answer but continued to ask the question over and over again...
...But others were not so pleased...
...The United States, Great Britain, and France want to modernize the Lance missiles, with procurement and development in 1989 and deployment in 1995...
...When short-range missiles are deployed in Germany, they have to be used in Germany," says Volker Ruhe, deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Party and its security spokesman in parliament...
...Soon it was an ugly and painful ulcerated sore...
...In this room Wingo says he had no real job...
...Moreover, the city's "emergency-preparedness" plan is widely seen as a sham...
...If you had seen my sores," says one of them, "you would not have been able to eat that day...
...Eventually, twenty-two guardsmen came down with the disease...
...Ten days later, back in Puerto Rico, Ortiz developed a skin rash accompanied by fever, diarrhea, severe itching, muscle pains, and a general malaise...
...They feared that they too might be punished...
...And, as their cases wend their way through the courts, the arrested resisters are using their trials as showcases for the cause...
...Then other members of Ortiz's PRANG unit began showing the same symptoms...
...The SDP goal has been to eliminate the Soviet capability of launching a surprise attack so Europe would no longer face a military threat, says Egon Bahr, a member of parliament who is a key architect of the party's foreign policy...
...It is believed to be the first time a Federal court has enjoined the military from sending soldiers to a specific location...
...When he decided to retire early, Nuss declined to recommend him for any career-service commendation...
...On July 8—one day before their unit was to be shipped out—the judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, ruling that the PRANG must provide the men with alternative training...
...to build thirteen new ports in eight states...
...The official aim of Homeport is to disperse the U.S...
...Wingo, who had spent his entire career as a health and occupational-safety inspector, found himself in an office where nobody cared what he did...
...But New York City now expects only about 900 jobs, and the payroll seems less impressive, given sailors' habit of sending much of their pay home and spending much of their free time on board ship...
...When he was bitten, Ortiz, a twenty-eight-year-old bank employee from Coamo, Puerto Rico, and the father of two small children, was on training exercises with his Puerto Rican Army National Guard (PRANG) unit, held that year at the Jungle Operation Training Center in Panama...
...across the border, the Soviet Union has 1,365 short-range weapons—with "short-range" defined as having a range of up to 300 miles...
...Wingo passed the final days of his career in this lonely setting, often wondering whether he had acted properly when he turned over a tape recording documenting the cover-up to Federal investigators...
...And, for the fourth time in a year, protesters have been arrested at the construction site...
...Another witness was Manhattan architect James Morgan...
...Navy is building a $188 million nuclear port on Staten Island anyway...
...Francis Flaherty (Francis Flaherty, a writer in New York, is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...It took three months from the time Ortiz and the others first reported their symptoms to the day they were flown to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., where they were diagnosed as having ACL...
...His trouble began after he exposed his superiors' plot to cover up a life-threatening spill of radioactive americium-laden waste (see "Hot Trash in Building 4060: An Air Force Cover-up," in the March 1988 issue...
...State Secretary Helmut Schaefer, number two in the foreign ministry, emphasizes the importance of reducing the Soviet advantage...
...Ambassador to West Germany Richard Burt is so upset by the West German consensus that, in a talk to a Paris foreign-affairs institute last spring, before an audience that included diplomats from Eastern Europe, he spoke of a "weird alliance" between Germany's antinuclear Left and its nationalistic Right in the debate on the future of nuclear weapons in Europe...
...They read Can you imagine fighting this traffic trying to escape new york in the event of a nuclear accident...
...The disease, which is endemic to much of Central America, is called "mountain leprosy" by the people there because of the festering sores...
...In June, the National Guard denied the request of eight of the men to train elsewhere...
...The larger case over the permanent injunction will probably be heard early next year...
...And after twenty of them were finally sent to Walter Reed, the guardsmen found they were unable to collect National Guard pay while in the hospital...
...We need a politics that continues further disarmament, but we see that the whole military apparatus, especially in the Pentagon and also in NATO, wants to modernize...
...For twenty-four years, Wendell Wingo gave up a twenty-four-year career because he felt he had to tell the truth...
...The blemish on his chest went away, but the one on his arm started to grow and open up...
...Ask him if he would do it again and Wingo answers without hesitation...
...A Kohl adviser adds, "It doesn't fit that when we discuss disarmament, we put forward a new modernization...
...It also advises that the carcinogenic substance "can be kept out of the lungs by placing a handkerchief over the nose and mouth" or by staying indoors...
...In past years, national sentiment was strongly divided over weapons policy, and the SPD was on the Left...
...The procedure proved highly successful...
...The belief that short-range weapons...
...I was shocked at first, then embarrassed...
...Sure," he says with defiance...
...We suggest a comprehensive concept," Ruhe continues, "connecting further reductions with restructuring, shifting emphasis away from the short-range and the concept of minimum deterrence...
...If I had done something wrong, it would be easier to accept...
...There is sometimes a divergence of opinion between the foreign ministry, run by Liberal foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and the Christian-Democratic Chancellor...
...But the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, sees little strategic value in the plan...
...Moody retired a week later and a review panel, at Glenn's insistence, removed the review from Wingo's file...
...Rather than let such a decision stand, the PRANG, with help from a Pentagon lawyer flown in from Washington, worked out a settlement in which the Guard agreed not to send the men in question to Panama this summer...
...Wingo says they feared being seen fraternizing with a traitor...
...Lucy van Hook of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, speaking at a public hearing...
...From 1976 to 1980, busy, narrow New York harbor was the scene of more than 600 shipping mishaps...
...Now, however, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl shares the socialists' view...
...There are several civil lawsuits pending against the port, including an environmental one brought by the Sierra Club...
...U.S...
...Wingo didn't know the spill was as serious as it was, but he was certain it was worse than the officers would admit...
...We don't see it necessary to discuss modernization of present weapons before we attempt to get the Soviets away from superiority," he says...
...The port at Stapleton, Staten Island, is part of "Home-port," a six-year-old, $800 million crusade by former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr...
...fleet to minimize risk during attack...
...For the most part, Wingo says, he's served under honorable commanders, who would not have asked him to lie or cover up a public hazard...
...And in 1986, the Navy revealed it had experienced two nuclear "accidents" and 628 nuclear "incidents" between 1965 and 1985...
...To be honest, there wasn't really any choice...
...So he decided to hold on to the tape...
...On the promise of 9,000 new jobs and a $50 million annual payroll for port personnel, most prominent New York politicians have supported Stapleton since its announcement in 1983...
...To get sacrificed for trying to do something right, that's what makes it hard...
...Because of him, the General Accounting Office scrutinized the storage of radioactive waste on all military bases...
...Wendell Wingo had been a standout in the U.S...
...Since July 1987, the strategy has been civil resistance, and nearly a hundred arrests have resulted...
...Tactical nuclear weapons," he says, "can kill only us, not the United States...
...In crowded New York City, he testified, a minor accidental rupture in a cruise missile could release enough deadly Plutonium to kill 10,000 people and cause billions of dollars' worth of damages...
...Over the past few years of battling its completion, activists organized in such groups as the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Harbor and the Mobilization for Survival have wielded everything from placards and petitions to lawsuits and public-opinion polls...
...In this room Wingo was not permitted a desk...
...Many were destitute and had to rely on the generosity of the hospital physicians and staff, who collected clothes and other items for them...
...He testified about his family's fretful flight to New York several years ago...
...one man's wife was convinced her husband had contracted syphilis while in Panama...
...It's like being fired...
...While doctors at Walter Reed say they consider the disease "clinically curable," they admit that a relapse is always possible...
...His commander had given him no duties, so he was left to wander the halls, lugging his folder, scavenging for odd jobs, anything to stay busy, anything to retain some dignity...
...The plan posits that released plutonium probably would not venture beyond a 2,000-foot area...
...When they first fell ill, many of the men were accused by their superiors of malingering...
...In this room, Wendell Wingo says, his superiors tried to break him...
...He has still not found a job...
...At their trial last spring, physicist Mi-chio Kaku took the stand...
...Because of him, the regulations for reporting accidents involving radioactive material have been strengthened nationwide...
...An emergency evacuation would simply be impossible in New York, and activists have made banners to display for the benefit of harried drivers on the city's congested roads...
...For Wingo, the administrative office symbolized the painful death of his exemplary military career...
...Ortiz himself also complains of frequent pains in the area of his scars and says that his left arm—the one that had open sores—tires easily, to the point that he can't use it, "even to turn pages," for more than a couple of hours without having to stop and rest...
...District Judge Raymond L. Acosta to issue a temporary restraining order, citing the opinion of psychiatrist Harry Gutierrez that the men were likely to undergo an aggravation of their emotional ailments should they be forced to return to Panama...
...DATELINES A Room Without a View DAYTON, OHIO The administrative personnel office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base medical center is like many other offices on many other military installations...
...Osha Davidson (Osha Davidson is a free-lance writer based in Mechanics-ville, Iowa...
...Even more important, the suit asks the court to bar the PRANG permanently from sending these men back to Panama for another training mission— which is exactly what the military recently sought to do...
...A trial last spring, for instance, featured as witnesses for the defense physicist Kaku, political scientist Howard Zinn, and retired Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll Jr., who agrees that Homeport has no strategic value...
...But the U.S...
...Navy spokesmen minimize the dangers and maximize the economic benefits of the port, and construction continues apace...
...For the first time, criticism of nuclear deterrence is not restricted to the Left, but comes from the Center and the Center-Right...
...So he regrets little, least of all turning over the tape...
...In talking about the PRANG's treatment of them, Ortiz says simply: "They abandoned us...
...Although no one knew it at the time, Ortiz had contracted a parasitic infection called American cutaneous leishmaniasis (ACL...
...Lucy Komisar (Lucy Komisar, a foreign-affairs writer based in New York, recently spent two months in Bonn...
...He says he was reassigned to the personnel office not to work, but as punishment...
...It's just stupid to put these weapons in such a populous area," says Ellen Yaroshefsky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a lawyer for some of the activists arrested in an earlier protest...
...The lawsuit asks for $ 1 million in damages and for psychiatric treatment and plastic surgery for the men...
...Iowa, its six-ship supporting flotilla, and 4,600 sailors and civilian personnel...
...To me, it seems like personal loyalties are put above the big picture, the more important question of radiation...
...Everybody knows that when somebody gets reassigned like that, they've done something wrong," he continues...
...For a while it felt as if we were running an orphanage," says one of the doctors who treated the men...
...Air Force, receiving lavish praise from his superiors and nearly flawless ratings...
...In August 1987, Moody gave Wingo an annual performance review so damaging it would have effectively kicked him out of the service...
...On August 9, the forty-third anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, twenty-seven activists scaled a ten-foot fence there, cheered on by scores of demonstrators bearing banners and a dummy nuclear missile...
...Save your handkerchiefs to dry your tears," was the response of Dr...
...They were later charged with disorderly conduct and other infractions...
...Ohio Senator John Glenn, who investigated the spill at Wright-Patterson, says Wingo acted with courage and integrity...
...The U.S...
...In this room nobody would talk to him...
...Short Range, Dead Germans' BONN, WEST GERMANY The late-summer national convention of West Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) produced a resolution that pushes into the foreground an issue simmering inside NATO councils: West German opposition to proposed modernization of short-range nuclear weapons sited in their country...
...But so does the resistance...
...The shorter the range, the deader the Germans...
...But on Wingo's tape, his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Maynard G. Moody, and his officers are heard planning to clean up the building themselves by vacuuming up the radioactive waste as if it were sawdust and then shipping it in unmarked containers to a commercial dump—a scheme that violated regulations of the Air Force, the Department of Transportation, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
...Ruhe predicts mass demonstrations in West Germany unless restructuring is undertaken...
...none of the men treated with the drug now shows evidence of parasitic infection...
...The New York City Board of Estimate is scheduled to vote on this "preparedness" plan in the fall...
...But, according to Charles Hey Maestre, general coordinator of the Puerto Rican Civil Rights Institute, which represents the guardsmen in a lawsuit brought last year against the military, the men are scared...
...Nine days after the review panel's action, Wingo's new commander, Colonel David A. Nuss, relieved him of duty and transferred him to the administrative office...
...The rash disappeared but was replaced by what looked like blackheads on his chest and one arm...
...People would come in and think, 'What's this senior master sergeant doing sitting around all day with nothing to do...
...There is no way of knowing if the parasite is still in their bodies...
...The appearance and smell from the oozing sores caused several men to lose their jobs...
...I figured they were going to try to blame the enlisted men...
...I'd do it again...
...And, in fact, at least two of the Puerto Rican guardsmen have already experienced relapses...
...Surface contamination of the building where the spill occurred was 140,000 times greater than what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers safe, and airborne radioactivity was nearly a million times above the Commission's safety limit...
...But Wingo's actions also exposed flaws in how the military responds to radioactive spills...
...They were fleeing Three Mile Island...
...Some admitted having suicidal thoughts when confronted with the prospect of returning to the area in which they contracted ACL...
...In 1986, they collected 100,000 signatures calling for a referendum on the nukeport, only to have the courts declare that process inappropriate...
...Dave Davis (Dave Davis is a reporter for the Dayton Daily News...
...They were going to act like they didn't know anything about the spill," Wingo says...
...ACL is incurable," says Hey...
...threaten only Germany is also central to the opposition of the conservatives...
...Its approval, which is not unlikely, is needed to free $ 10 million in city funds for port development...
...He even called on the French to help keep Germany in NATO, intimating that their desire for disarmament meant the West Germans might turn neutral...
...Some people are more concerned about the effect on their own careers than they are about the danger to anybody else...
...Hate to have that get into enemy hands," he quipped...
...I just wanted to do what was right...
...At the hospital, the guardsmen took part in a study in which they were given twice the normal dosage of the experimental drug Pentostam...
...He must have really screwed up.' But I didn't really screw up...
...He carried his papers in a folder, clinging to his career's worth of work like a bag lady...
...Wingo retired on July 1. Now, at age forty-three, Wingo faces the difficult task of putting the past behind him, of finding a job to support his wife and two children, of explaining to prospective employers why they should expect a less-than-enthusiastic reference from his last employer...
...I don't even know where to start," Wingo says, taking a breath before relating his fall from military grace...
...By turning over the tape he had been ordered to destroy, and by cooperating with investigators from the Senate and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Wingo embarrassed many at the base, exposing character flaws in some of his colleagues...
...An Outbreak of 'Mountain Leprosy' SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO For Jose Calixto Ortiz, the nightmare began in the summer of 1984 with the almost unnoticeable bite of a sandfly...
...According to expert testimony given in their case, several of the men suffer from emotional ailments ranging from anxiety and hypochondria to severe depression...
...Even those who had known Wingo during his seven years at the base's Bioenvironmental Engineering Group shied away...
...The request to America," says Social Democratic member of parliament Dietrich Stobbe, "is that it doesn't now, after the INF treaty, make a compensatory buildup...
...The discussion of this cover-up ends with Moody instructing Wingo to erase the tape...
...Their neighbors shunned them, believing they had leprosy...
...Schaefer thinks the future of short-range weapons should be discussed in the context of the results of the Vienna talks on reduction of conventional weapons—and adds that his government favors reduction, not elimination of the weapons as advanced by the SPD...
...Homeport on the Hudson NEW YORK CITY It's "as nutty as nuclear weapons in Central Park," says a local member of Congress...
...Instead, Nuss scribbled, "Get rid of him...
...The civil-rights group immediately asked U.S...
...The Navy never discusses things nuclear, but almost everyone assumes the ships will carry cruise missiles...
...Particles of plutonium can easily pass through cloth, she explained...
...A large rupture or a detonation would be a disaster of ungraspable magnitude...
...Their primary symptoms—the ulcerated sores-may be gone, but they can suffer a relapse at any time...
...Congress is unlikely to vote financing unless West Germany agrees to stationing...
...But for Wendell Wingo, a noncommissioned officer who had served his country on three continents for nearly twenty-four years, the nondescript room had come to be much more than a few metal desks and a place to process papers...
...NATO has eighty-eight short-range Lance missiles deployed in West Germany...
...The port, just a stone's throw from Manhattan, is slated to berth the 58,000-ton battleship U.S.S...
...Activists oppose the port for that reason alone, but they find the location particularly absurd...
...in the margin of the AirlForce decoration form...
...But on this subject, Kohl believes the matter can be decided only after there is a clearer idea of where conventional force and long-range-missile reduction talks are headed...
...And, when investigators asked, he turned it over...
...The drum full of americium waste was so hot that no waste facility in the United States was licensed to handle it...
Vol. 52 • November 1988 • No. 11
