When Emily Konopinski announced her plans to enter the Air Force, everyone was surprised. She had completed her first year of college as a Political Science major, but felt the military experience would make her resume more impressive, especially for a future in politics. Emily visited an Air Force recruiter in Montclair, New Jersey, and was taken by the travel and educational experiences promised her. Her family and friends were dubious—her mother had lost some friends in the Vietnam War.
She signed up after being assured she would get training as a photographer for the Air Force. Her recruiter told her that she had a great portfolio and a position would be available, but that she had to enter basic training under Open General classification and “audition” once she got there. “I tried to think of as many questions as possible for the recruiters and get the answers, and I thought I was getting them ... basically, the recruiter told me ’You’re going to have access to any job’.”
Emily entered basic training in Lackland, Texas in the fall of 1999 and found her job options severely limited. “They never explained that there are maybe three people in the Air Force who work as photographers and there was no chance of even being an entry level person. Those are people coming in from other career fields. There’s something called pipeline, where you go straight from basic training into your job. But then there’s cross training. And the reality was the number of pipeline folks who’d ever get the opportunity to audition would be one in thousands.”
When Emily finally met with a career counselor, she was given two job options. Since she had come in under Open General status, she could only choose between two jobs that had been pre-selected for her. One was a paratrooper—“There was no way I was going to take a job jumping out of planes.” The other was Readiness Apprentice, which was described as akin to the Peace Corps—maintaining peace during peacetime, offering relief in case of natural disasters, and training others to deal with nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. “But during wartime, you were responsible for decontaminates, defusing bombs, tear gas—all that’s under your job description ... I felt at that point like the liability and responsibility was on my recruiter, and that he had jerked me around to fill his quota.”
Shortly after arriving in Texas, she began exhibiting unusual health symptoms. “Four weeks into basic training, I developed my first rash, and it was horrible. My hands were bleeding ... I actually had to sneak Neosporin because we weren’t allowed to self-medicate at all. I was lathering my hands with Neosporin and putting socks on my hands when I went to sleep.” She wasn’t the only one to develop afflictions. Two other girls in her squadron had the same type of rash, but their symptoms seemed to go away as Emily’s got worse. But it wasn’t only their physical health that was being affected.
“There was one girl who was chronically depressed. She was overdosing on pills. They would send her to the medical center and she would come back with Zoloft and Prozac and the next night she would have taken all of them, and no one would intervene. They basically left us to do suicide watch for this girl.” Emily went to one of the superior officers and told him about the squadron’s concerns, but nothing was done.
“A few weeks into basic training a girl died, supposedly from a strain of Strep throat. They woke us up in the middle of the night, dragged us all to the hospital, and gave us all these injections. Since then, I’ve spoken to a bunch of doctors about what they may have given us ... it’s not on any of our records ... and whether or not she actually died of Strep. There’s a lot of controversy around that.”
Emily’s rashes didn’t improve, and her physical problems worsened. “Toward the end of training, I broke both my feet—they said it’s pretty common. Because of the weight of the boots, and marching, some bones can’t take it. Their response was ‘wear your sneakers instead of your boots’, so I did all the regular training with sneakers on, and it was hell ... Their answer to everything was medication. It was all about painkillers, treating the symptom instead of the problem. I didn’t want to be manipulated or in and out of a coherent state. I would rather have just endured the pain and gotten the fuck out of there, so that’s what I did.”
While she was home for a holiday break she saw some civilian doctors, who suspected an autoimmune disease. “They asked about the shot we got when the girl died from Strep, and all the other injections they’d given us when we got to basic.” Some of the doctors thought Emily was developing Multiple Sclerosis.
In January 2000, Emily went to Fort Leonardwood in Missouri to begin her job training. Within a month she began to exhibit a host of alarming symptoms. “I was a mess. I couldn’t eat without going to the bathroom within seconds. I was vomiting pretty much every other day, I developed a really bad rash on my face. Pain all over ... I couldn’t hold my arms up long enough to braid my hair. I had numbness. I would fall a lot. I was gaining weight, I was losing weight. My body was a wasteland.”
“It wasn’t until three or four months later that they allowed me to see a real doctor. The medical building only had physician’s assistants, who prescribed me everything under the sun—OxyContin, Zoloft, Percocet, Tylenol with Codeine—every drug that would put you on another planet, and I never took any of them, except for Ibuprofen.”
Emily flew to different military doctors around the country. They all wanted to prescribe medications, but no one made a diagnosis. Finally, Emily spoke to a sergeant and convinced him to let her go to a civilian doctor. She was driven to a university-affiliated hospital in Missouri, and told she tested positive for Lupus and doctors suspected MS was also active.
For most of the next year, she was flown to a doctor in Texas every few months to run a battery of diagnostic tests for five or six days at a time. Meanwhile, she couldn’t progress in her job training—she was in limbo medically and professionally.
“There was nothing stable for me, and I was just left there to figure out what was wrong with me. And that’s when it got to the point that I thought ‘I have to get out of here, because I’m being destroyed.’”
“I started to talk to them about either letting me pick another career field, getting me home, or putting me somewhere near my family.” Emily wrote letters, placed phone calls, and spoke to as many people as possible who she thought would have influence or provide some kind of help. In the summer of 2000, she was finally promised an honorable discharge (see importance of honorable discharge on p. 7) but each time the date arrived it would be pushed back.
One of the main delays with Emily’s discharge was the disability rating. “The military didn’t want to take responsibility for what had happened to me, they didn’t want to diagnose me with a life-threatening disease like MS or Lupus. [Instead, they] diagnosed me with fibromyalgia, finally, as the official military diagnosis ... which only offered me a 10% disability rating. It’s a disease that affects joints and tissues, some doctors don’t even believe in it.”
When Emily met with the head of the military hospital who was to make the final decision on her disability rating, she brought all her medical records. “He took one of the letters with diagnoses that I had gotten from a civilian doctor and shredded it. He got up from the desk, put it in the paper shredder, and I fucking lost it. I was cursing and screaming, and I got up in his face and yelled ‘This is all I have, this is what I need to take to doctors when I get out to get real help.’”
She told her sergeant what had happened, and he took her side. “Although we could never get the paper back, the satisfaction that a sergeant that would go to bat with me validated a lot. That was really big.”
Emily left Missouri in December 2000, her leave tacked onto the end of her stay, and was finally officially discharged in March 2001.
Emily usually visits the VA Hospital once every week or two for x-rays, evaluations and physical therapy. Her health is a continuous concern.Some doctors are sure she will develop MS, although her recent MRI scans have been good. She has had major skin, kidney, heart, and lung problems that are Lupus-related. She has had three intestinal surgeries since being discharged, and is “about $30,000 in debt.” Her medical disability check every month is $108.
Some doctors have attributed her continuing health problems directly to the military, including one doctor who was so convinced the military was responsible that he contacted every lawyer he knew or had ever worked with and was going to take Emily on pro bono. “He’d mentioned [that] he had come across other people from the military who had these kinds of problems.” However, the doctor was unsuccessful in getting an attorney interested in pursuing the case. “I found out after seeing many, many doctors and lawyers, that people are really scared of the military. It’s a force that no one wants to go against.”
Kelly Air Force Base, Lackland’s adjacent sister base, has been partially closed, allegedly for economic reasons. “A lot of people have spoken about it having contaminated water because we were near a nuclear plant—we would have been using the same water. Prevention magazine reported 67 people who had been stationed at Kelly had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease ... lupus was also on that list, and cervical cancer.” Approximately 30,000 patients in the United States currently have Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.1 For 67 people in one area of San Antonio to be diagnosed with the disease is unusual at best, and suspicious at worst.
Kelly, which stores and maintains aircrafts, jet engines, and “accessory components (including nuclear materials)” is said to produce more than 292,000 tons of hazardous waste per year.2 A health survey taken in the neighborhood surrounding Kelly in 1997 found that 91% of adults and 79% of children are suffering multiple illnesses ranging from ear, nose and throat conditions to central nervous system disorders.3
Emily is now a film student. When she began to lose function in the back of her brain, a doctor suggested she take up painting as a way to strengthen her motor skills. “It was miraculous for me…and that’s what brought me back to school for art.” Emily is pursuing a film degree with the hope that she will some day address her experience in the military through a camera lens. “Right now I’m applying for disability through the state. I’ve never been someone to do that—I’ve worked since I was 14. Now I’m 25, and I recognize that on some days even studying is difficult. My life is completely different. I walk with a cane half the year, and I wear braces. There’s a lot of shit I just did not expect.”
SOURCES: (1) The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association’s Website www.alsa.org • (2) Southwest Public Workers’ Union, “North Kelly Gardens Community Health Survey near Kelly AFB, Texas,” Revised Edition, 10/23/97, p. 3 • (3) Ibid.
A SOLDIER’S STORY: CHRIS
“The military didn’t contribute a damn thing to my life, except I can do this counter-recruitment work now.”
A SOLDIER’S STORY: ANITA
“I didn’t think I was a killer, but what the hell was I out there doing if that’s not what I was?”