What's really scary is that Hawai'i National Guardsmen and U.S. forces stationed in the islands don't have to go to Iraq to get DU exposure. Early this year the anti-war group DMZ Hawaii/Aloha 'Aina obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a Sept. 19, 2005 email from a military official outlining a survey of the Schofield Barracks.

"We have found much that we did not expect, including recent find of depleted uranium," Samuel P. McManus of the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center in Alabama told U.S. Army official Ronald Borne. "We are pulling tons of frag and scrap out of the craters in the western area to the point where it has basically turned into a manual sifting operation. Had this not been a CWM [Chemical Warfare Material] site, we would have moved mechanical sifters in about 5 weeks ago but the danger is just too high."

In a Jan. 6, 2006 Honolulu Advertiser story on the memo, U.S. Army officials confirmed that clean-up contractors at Schofield Barracks had located 15 tail assemblies from D-38 uranium alloy rounds that dated to the 1960's. The army officials said the rounds posed no danger.

Yeah, no danger, except to Pentagon public relations. Much the way the military officials spent years vigorously denying that Agent Orange caused the cancers that were killing Vietnam vets, they denied that U.S. forces ever used DU rounds during training exercises at Schofield or any other base in Hawai'i.

It's possible military officials are correct in their assertion that depleted uranium doesn't cause Gulf War Syndrome or any other medical problems. But given their track record, they can hardly blame people for not trusting them.