We’re still failing the survivors: 

“In more than 20 years, the VA attempted to reach just 610 of the men, with a single letter sent in the mail,” NPR reporters said. “Brad Flohr, a VA senior adviser for benefits, says the agency couldn’t find the rest, because military records of the experiments were incomplete. There was no identifying information, he says. No Social Security numbers, no addresses, no … way of identifying them.”

But an NPR research librarian, working just two months using VA’s own list to scour public records, found more than 1,200 of the subjects.

The radio journalists interviewed more than 40 living test subjects and family members. The volunteer troops had been unwittingly subjected to mustard gas to test the effectiveness of masks inside a gas chamber –at a time when U.S. intelligence feared use of such gas by the Germans and Japanese.

These are the things we don’t think about when starting a new war every month.

A.