Operation Desert Storm Veterans

More than 135 Los Angeles city employees who participated in the Persian Gulf War were honored Friday during a ceremony at City Hall. Mayor Tom Bradley presented certificates of appreciation to the employees, most of them police officers. City Atty. Jim Hahn said that the ceremony was the city's way of offering an official welcome home to Operation Desert Storm veterans.

A Pentagon-sponsored study has found grounds to suspect that an experimental nerve gas antidote given to as many as 300,000 U.S. troops during the Persian Gulf War may be a cause of the mysterious "Gulf War syndrome." Contradicting earlier official studies, the two-year analysis by the Rand Corp.--which will be released today--has concluded that the drug pyridostigmine bromide "cannot be excluded as a contributor" to a malady blamed for symptoms afflicting tens of thousands of veterans.

Lt. Cmdr. Nathaniel Bryant stood with his gear in a dark loading bay of the amphibious assault ship Tarawa, anchored off Oceanside on Saturday morning. It had been seven months since Bryant had shipped out to the Persian Gulf--seven months since he had seen his wife and children. "Seven months is a long time," Bryant said just before boarding a helicopter that would ferry him to shore for a reunion with his family.

A study shows for the first time how prolonged stress and a drug given to protect Persian Gulf War soldiers against chemical warfare each may cause long-term disruptions of memory and learning. Each creates a long-lasting decrease in mice of acetylcholine, a chemical messenger between brain cells that is important to thinking, the study said. The discovery could provide two ways to explain the thinking problems reported by some veterans who complain of Gulf War Syndrome.

The four Camp Pendleton Marines killed Wednesday when their UH-1 Huey helicopter apparently broke apart and crashed near the Salton Sea during a training flight were identified Thursday as Persian Gulf War veterans. Officials at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro identified the dead Marines as Master Sgt. Joe C. Snell Jr., 41, of Oceanside; Capt. Daniel J. Adams, 30, of Brick Ocean, N.J.; Capt. Phillip G. Chapman, 30, of Ft. Lewis Pierce, Wash., and Cpl. Jeffrey D.

Don Beaulieu's homecoming fell a little short of a ticker-tape parade. He returned from the Persian Gulf War on a stretcher, his body in tatters. It took the U.S. military 12 days to get him to the right hospital. Then he learned that his left foot would have to be amputated. In late March, two days before the operation in an Augusta, Ga., medical center, the 26-year-old U.S. Army sergeant from rural Maine turned to his fiancee, Sandra Sapp. "Are you still going to marry me?" he asked her sadly.

Newspaper headlines struck a hauntingly familiar chord last week, as Iraq's refusalto follow United Nations peace resolutions awakened the specter of renewed military action in the Persian Gulf. The nation held its breath--along with executives at ABC. The network had scheduled its docudrama "The Heroes of Desert Storm" to air this Sunday--six months to the day after the government of Iraq accepted terms for a permanent cease-fire.

Outside the American pavilion at Le Bourget Airport here, a pair of U.S. soldiers in desert fatigues stood proudly in front of their Patriot missile battery and answered questions from admiring and curious onlookers. "We painted it up to make it look pretty," said Sgt. Anthony Bates, 21, of Kingsland, Ga., pointing to the boxy camouflaged launcher--the same one he had manned in Israel during the Gulf War. "I reckon it did its job in the war."

A decorated U.S. Marine who served in the Persian Gulf War allegedly killed his ex-wife and 5-year-old daughter late Saturday night and wounded another woman in a shooting spree 17 days after his divorce became final. Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Steven Gibson, 32, burst into his ex-wife's second-floor apartment and shot her roommate, 32-year-old Wendy Johnson, once in the chest, police said. Gibson then went into a bedroom, where he turned a .

A flag-waving crowd of 200,000 Saturday cheered veterans of Operation Desert Storm as the nation's capital staged its biggest victory celebration since the end of World War II. Stealth fighter planes zoomed overhead, tanks and Patriot missiles rolled by and more than 8,000 battle-clad troops marched past a beaming President Bush in a display of the American military might that crushed Iraq in 43 days of combat.

President Clinton has ordered creation of a new oversight body to monitor how the Pentagon investigates the causes of so-called Gulf War illnesses in a rebuke to defense officials' handling of the issue, officials said Friday. As a White House advisory panel wraps up its study of the ailments today with release of a final report, Clinton is expected to announce the five-member oversight panel headed by former Sen. Warren B. Rudman.

A congressional panel says the investigation into Gulf War illnesses by the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs was handled so poorly that it will recommend they be stripped of their authority over the matter, a newspaper reports. The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight says Congress should create or designate an independent agency to coordinate research into the cause of the illnesses, the New York Times reports in today's editions.

Some U.S. Gulf War veterans suffer from a form of brain damage found in victims of toxic poisoning, a group of U.S. doctors said in Dallas. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center said they tested 46 Gulf War veterans from a U.S. Navy reserve unit. They reported finding that 20 were healthy and 26 suffered from memory and sleep problems, fatigue, confusion, imbalance and sore joints and muscles.

Five years ago this week, as American-led forces began an aerial bombing campaign against Iraq, four San Fernando Valley soldiers prepared for combat. Soon they were on the march in Saudi Arabia, waging a bloody ground war against the forces of Saddam Hussein, who had invaded the oil-rich nation of Kuwait. One worked as a military policeman, guarding prisoners of war. Another picked out Iraqi targets and verified enemy casualties. Two held administrative posts.

A massive government study of more than 10,000 veterans of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 has found no evidence of any kind of mysterious "Gulf War disease," despite claims by some victims that they suffer from severe symptoms, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Dr.

The Defense Department said Tuesday that it has been unable to find any medical evidence pointing to a single cause for the widely reported "Gulf War syndrome," but it vowed to intensify its research and to set up special centers to treat the illness. In a preliminary report, officials said examinations of 1,019 Persian Gulf War veterans who have complained of unusual symptoms show that 85% of the cases involve already recognizable illnesses, from arthritis to sleep disorders.

The day it happened, Marine Cpl. Brett Doggett of Mission Viejo was clutching his rifle and taking hushed steps past a smelly chicken coop and an old well, checking house-to-house for Iraqi snipers. A charcoal sky from distant oil fires covered a Kuwaiti landscape as flat as Kansas while the 26-year-old Camp Pendleton Marine gingerly minced through a spoiled garden and walked along the bottom of a berm. Then, the explosion.

A judge dismissed a first-degree murder charge Monday against the wife of a Persian Gulf War veteran who was shot to death less than 24 hours after returning to his family from his tour of duty in the Saudi desert. District Judge Vesta Svenson freed Toni Cato Riggs, accused in the March 18 death of Army Spec. Anthony Riggs. Her brother confessed to the killing, saying it was part of a plot to reap insurance benefits.

Preliminary results from a new survey have raised suspicions that the mysterious illnesses that have afflicted more than 20,000 Persian Gulf War veterans since their return home may be contagious, Senate sources said Thursday.

The Pentagon, hoping to prevent a repeat of the mysterious spate of illnesses in those who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, will require medical personnel deployed to Kuwait in the current operation to keep careful records of troop exposure to possible environmental hazards and drug treatments, officials said Wednesday. "This time we will try to get this information as we go instead of after the fact," said Col. Doug Hart, a spokesman for the Defense Department.