Army Staff Sgt. Mark Jackson documented his health issues in a daily journal while stationed at the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan in 2003. Army Staff Sgt. Mark Jackson kept a daily journal, documenting how he became permanently sickened while stationed at the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan in 2003.
Yellow tabs protrude from his blue spiraled notebook, marking dozens of pages in which he logged his growing list of health issues.
“The air here is poison,” he wrote on July 28, 2003, shortly after arriving at the Soviet-era air base, according to journal entries he shared with NBC News.
The symptoms emerged one by one throughout the pages: stomach cramps, incessant headaches and extreme exhaustion. By the time Jackson made it back to Melbourne, Florida, in April 2004, the former marathoner said he could barely walk up a flight of stairs.
From 2006 to April of this year, he was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid disease, irritable bowel syndrome, gastroesophageal reflux disease, anemia, testicular necrosis and osteoporosis. In 2020, Jackson, now 47, said his doctor told him, “You have the bones of an 80-year-old woman.”
Jackson filed for disability compensation for all his ailments but said he only got approved for the thyroid disease. He is among many veterans who say they are waiting for the government to recognize that their illnesses are related to military toxic exposure, advocates say.
A report released Wednesday found that sick veterans have waited an average of 31.4 years from when they first made contact with dangerous toxins on duty to when the government acknowledged they were exposed. Mark Jackson at the mountains in northern Uzbekistan in 2003. The report by the Military Officers Association of America and DAV, formerly known as Disabled American Veterans, analyzed military toxic exposures in the last century to determine how long it took the Department of Veterans Affairs or Congress to formally recognize that the exposures caused disabilities.
Three decades is a “shamefully long” time for veterans to wait, the groups said in the report, especially considering the prevalence of toxins at military bases and deployment sites.
“There isn’t a major conflict in the […]
Veterans wait 30 years on average for the U.S. to acknowledge toxic exposures, new report says
