Falcon's Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir

Falcon's Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir, Michael and Denise Donnelly, Praeger, 1998

 Here is the story of an average kid from suburban Connecticut who joins the Air Force right out of high school, wanting to be a fighter pilot. He goes through pilot training, rises through the ranks, and eventually becomes an F-16 pilot, a real Top Gun. Married and with a daughter, everything seems to be going his way. One day, his unit is sent to the Gulf to assist in Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein.

While the American public saw a sanitized, video game version of the war, the authors show the war from the inside: flying in occasionally horrible conditions, the bombs that didn't work properly, the colleagues who didn't return at the end of the day.

Some years later, when Michael is the teacher for new fighter pilots, he contracts this strange weakness in his whole body that forces him out of the air, and eventually into a wheelchair. He learns later that he is one of thousands and thousands of Gulf War veterans who are sick at rates much higher than average. The military doctors tell Donnelly that his chronic, and worsening, weakness is due to stress and get really testy at the mere mention of the words Gulf War Syndrome. (One wonders how illnesses as diverse as lupus, asthma, cancer and ALS, Donnelly's eventual diagnosis, could all be due to stress, as the Pentagon claims, despite the fact that this was, relatively speaking, an unstressful war.) The Pentagon claims that the thousands of chemical weapons alarms that sounded during the war were all false
alarms.

Forced to retire from the military, Donnelly and his family traveled the world of alternative medicine, looking for any ray of hope. Some of the doctors seemed honest and sincere, and willing to try. Others could generously be described as quacks. Unfortunately, nothing helped.

Today, Donnelly is confined to a wheelchair. He and his family, now including a son, are among the thousands of Gulf War veteran families still looking for answers from a Pentagon in no hurry to give them.
The Donnellys do a wonderful job with this book. Read the official memoirs and histories of the Gulf War, then read Falcon's Cry, the Real history of the Gulf War.