March 4, 1991
He'll tell you exactly when it started. Not roughly, not approximately — exactly. March 4, 1991. Fifteen minutes after his unit demolished an ammunition depot in the Iraqi desert, Ron Brown's head was pounding. He couldn't breathe. His vision blurred. His nose was running and he was sweating like a faucet — in the middle of winter. He went to the medic. Got an IV. And never fully recovered.
Before that day, Brown was a peak-performing soldier: regularly scoring between 250 and 280 on his physical fitness tests, no problem on the two-mile run. He had joined the Army in January 1989, completed basic training and Airborne School, and served with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. He had deployed to Panama in December 1989 for Operation Just Cause, then to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm on August 16, 1990, serving through April 7, 1991. He had gone to the desert and done his job.
He came home April 7, 1991. He failed his PT run at 19 minutes. Road marches that should have taken under three hours were taking him longer, and he couldn't explain why.
"I was scared," he says. "I thought they'd put me out on something other than an honorable discharge."
Searching for Answers
As a lower-enlisted soldier, Brown didn't know he could have fought for a medical retirement. When President Clinton's reduction in forces offered him a way out a year early, he took it, spending the remainder of his contract in the active reserves while searching for answers about what had happened to his body.
Three weeks at Walter Reed produced clues but no resolution. Testing revealed he had lost lung volume. A CT scan with contrast appeared to show scarring on the outside of his lungs. Then, in 1997, the first letter arrived from the Department of Defense: there was a possibility that chemical munitions had been destroyed at Khamisiyah — the same site where his unit had conducted demolitions. A second notification came in 2000.
Brown took issue with the language. The letters said veterans "may have been exposed" to chemical warfare agents. But a 2004 DoD investigation used stronger language — that personnel in the hazard area were "likely exposed" — wording that carries more legal weight in VA adjudication. Brown spent the next decade fighting the DoD over that distinction. This past December, the DoD finally acknowledged it had used the wrong language in its original assessment.
It took him 13 years to get his Gulf War-related conditions service connected.
"It may not sound like much," he says. "But during that time, I knew nothing about VA policies or procedures. Lots of trial and error, denials, appeals. If you don't have PTSD before going through that process, going through it can give it to you. It is not user-friendly. And it can impact your health."
He didn't want other veterans to go through what he had. So, he became an advocate.
Into the Science
Today Brown takes 28 medications a day and uses three different inhalers and a nebulizer. But he hasn't just been a patient — he's been a participant. Brown has been involved in Gulf War Illness clinical trials since the mid-1990s, including a long-term doxycycline study that ultimately made his condition worse, and a carnosine brain imaging study through CDMRP. A CoQ10 study led by Dr. Beatrice Golomb at UC San Diego offered more meaningful results — improving his energy levels and cognitive function. It isn't a cure. But it helped.
The problem, as Brown sees it, is that promising findings rarely go anywhere. Pilot studies show results, and then nothing happens. Studies go unreplicated. A body of research that once encompassed hundreds of relevant findings gets winnowed down until it circles back on itself. But Brown is determined to make sure veterans don't have to go through what he did, and that the science doesn't stall on his watch.
He has been a peer reviewer for CDMRP since around 2014, sitting alongside medical professionals on panels and working twice as hard, he says, just to keep up with the terminology. He also sits on an advisory body, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, though he notes the VA has been cutting committee staffing — another warning sign he isn't ignoring.
When the CDMRP Gulf War Illness program was cut from $30 million to $15 million, Brown started writing letters to the White House.
"CDMRP over the years has produced the largest amount of Gulf War Illness research that has shown promise," he says. "But we have pilot studies that show promise and are hardly ever replicated for verification."
For the Next Generation
More than three decades after March 4, 1991, Brown is still fighting — for answers, for funding, for the veterans who came home sick and still don't know why.
When asked what it would mean if the research were fully funded and finally succeeded, he doesn't hesitate.
"I'm hoping it produces a cure. But even if it's not a cure — if it gives veterans something that grants them a better quality of life, that's something. And even if it's not in our lifetime, there will be toxic exposures on the battlefield again. Maybe something will come from this that helps future generations. Our kids. Our grandkids."
