Breathe In

Walking up to the Minneapolis VA hospital for the first time, I feel a long-forgotten sense of dread and shame. I’ve been out of the military for fifteen years, and I’m not in uniform, but it’s the same feeling that I used to get walking up to any chow hall or military building on the Balad Air Base in Iraq. Dread because I hated always having to be on guard and alert in case I passed an officer and needed to salute. Shame because often I’d be thinking about something else, pass an officer without saluting, and then get called out by the officer for not respecting rank and not paying attention to my demeanor or my surroundings. Once, outside the PX — the makeshift store where we bought junk food and deodorant and CDs — an officer yelled at me for several minutes while I stood in a position of attention and tried to imagine what would happen if I just took off in a dead sprint away from him.

I am early for my appointment, so I spend ten minutes just wandering the halls. I find the chapel and the cafeteria, the emergency department and a lobby of people waiting for X-rays. I pass a woman who can’t find her husband. Another woman is knocking on the door to the single-user restroom, asking if her husband is in there. He is not, but someone else is. On my way back toward the main entrance, I pass a couple just as the wife turns to her husband and tells him to use the restroom while she pulls the car around. I smile at both of them, but they don’t notice me at all.

I am at the VA to participate in a research study called “Service and Health Among Deployed Veterans” (SHADE). The purpose of the study is to learn more about the long-term impact of pollution exposures on the health of veterans who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and five other countries after Oct. 1, 2001. For years, I’d been reading reports and news stories about veterans coming down with a whole range of unexplainable symptoms after serving overseas. Veterans contracting sinusitis or asthma, or getting ulcers or open lesions on their skin. Vets who were perfectly healthy before being deployed but returned barely able to exercise without getting winded. Vets dying of rare cancers or contracting respiratory illnesses like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which causes coughing and wheezing and makes it difficult to breathe. Some vets started to because of the lack of proof that burn pits were making them sick. It also took years for some of these symptoms to materialize, forcing some vets to wait for approval for their claims before even setting up appointments with the VA. People started calling burn pits my generation’s Agent Orange.