Dave Edmond Lounsbury

A soldier from the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade adjusts his gas mask prior to an air analysis mission near an oil and gas separation plant at the Baba Gurgur oil field outside northern Iraq's town of Kirkuk on May 3, 2003.

The Army’s secrecy habit kept US troops from getting needed treatment after chemical weapons exposure

Health

Iraq may not have had the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration believed, but it did have stockpiles of long-abandoned chemical weapons. And this week, C.J. Chivers of The New York Times blew the lid off of the Army’s long silence on those weapons — and the soldiers they harmed.