As we all know, if you are a low ranking soldier, poor, a member of an ethnic minority without the funding to interest Halliburten, Uranium of any sort can cause you no harm.. When I lived in the uranium mining devastated town of Nucla, Colorado, I myself noticed how radiation bounced right off me, and I never felt a thing. Heh! Stupid old uranium tailings! They can’t get ME! (Excuse me while I go cough up one of my lungs for a moment).
I have posted before about the horrors old uranium mines and tailings have unleased on Colorado’s far western slope and the triage of 3 small former uranium towns – Naturita, Nucla, and Uravan. At least no one has to worry about Uravan, anymore. The uranium outfits and the EPA plowed the whole town under. Uravan was no big loss. Its few remaining residents were a bunch of malingerers who claimed to have lung cancer or something stupid. You’ll be happy to know that Uncle Sam made short shift of these slackers and denied most of them their disability claims. I think they all crawled over the Utah state line and died in Monticello or something, saving the good Republican tax payers of Colorado the cost of indiginent burial fees.
Of course the only- good- Indian- is- a- dead- Indian Navajo have a slightly different take on things:
Quote:
Miners, millers, truckers, and their families were exposed to radiation levels as much as 750 times the 1950 standards. By the 1950s, the first ghosts began to appear – ghosts of the victims of lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, tuberculosis, birth defects, kidney damage. Navajo called the ailments “red lungs” for the red they coughed up, or “uranium on the lungs” and “radiation around the heart.” (see Memories Come to Us in the Rain and the Wind: Oral Histories and Photographs of Navajo Uranium Miners and Their Families).
Leetso, the yellow monster, had released evil into Dinè'tah. The industry went bust in the ‘80s; the ghosts continue to congregate. A flood of eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid poured down the Rio Puerco drainage at Church Rock, New Mexico, on July 16, 1979, thirty-four years to the day after Leetso’s birth.
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http://www.cpluhna.nau.edu/Change/uranium.htm
Eh, what do they know? Buncha of aborgines!
As for alcoholism and the VA – there’s another fun story. For fifty years and more, the Army actively encouraged drinking among its rank and file. When I worked as an advocate for Gulf War Vets from Desert Storm, one of the young soldiers I tried to help had been confined to post. He was a former alcoholic trying to stay sober. For entertainment, the base where he was confined offered about a half dozen NCO clubs with neon signs flashing the names of various beers. Drinking was a common place in his barracks, and I’d often walk past groups of young soldiers carrying in cases of beer or throwing up in the parking lot outside the barracks when I came by to drop off legal paperwork for this young man. Many soldiers self medicate the symptoms of PTSD with alcohol which ends them up with TWO problems – PTSD and alcoholism. The Army mostly still throws soldiers with PTSD out onto the streets. The VA diagnoses their alcoholism, refuses to recognize that the condition is service related, so the vet ends up on a street corner with his “Homeless Vet, Please Help” sign while all those holier than thou Americans who have never been on a battlefield, much less inside a barracks, spit on him.