All Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front

One summer while I was in college, a relative in the construction industry got me a job doing hot tar roofing. It was excellent money (union scale), but absolutely miserable work. I had to get up about five in the morning, and drive to the job site, then spend 8 - 10 hours up on a blistering hot roof in East St. Louis, doing all the physically demanding and horrid things one has to do to replace a 'tar' roof on a large commercial building.

Early on, I learned to be leery of the tar pump - a machine placed on the ground that heated the big bales of pitch into an easy-to-use fluid, then pumped it up a long pipe to the roof site. From there, it was loaded into various machines used to spread it evenly on the roof surface, and then covered with gravel. Now, to get the pitch to the necessary consistency, it had to be heated to between 550 and 650 degrees (if memory serves - this was 30 years ago). Meaning that when it came out of the pipe, it was extremely dangerous to handle, and you had to be very careful or it would wash the skin right off of your bones. Also, about midway through the heating cycle, the stuff would give off a pale greenish gas that you learned to avoid as well.

First time I saw that gas, I knew what it must be. I'd had enough chemistry, and had read Im Western Nichts Neues - (All Quiet on the Western Front). It was chlorine gas, one of the first lethal chemical weapons used during WWI. Since it was being disbursed from a pipe in open air, it was really only a danger if you were foolish enough to allow it to waft over open skin just as it fell from the pipe end (the stuff is heavier than air, so "spills" and flows down as it disperses). But even just a passing contact of the gas with open skin was enough to leave chemical burns that would antagonize for hours or days.

And now it is one of the favorite "enhancements" for car & truck bombers in Iraq, having been used multiple times this year and again just today. Except this is concentrated chlorine gas, similar to what was used to such lethal effect during World War I. It's thick enough to kill if breathed in, and heavy enough concentration so as to settle into pools and eddies, creating just another hazzard for anyone caught in the area or entering it to help the injured from the primary blast. To my knowledge, it hasn't yet been employed against American or 'Coalition' forces, but has been used principally against civilian targets.

We went into this war under the pretense of finding 'weapons of mass destruction' - chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Well, now at least one of these has been found to be used, though it isn't by Saddam Hussein. Careful what you wish for, I suppose.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to dKos.)