For the next 30 days, Edwards was made to sit, lie and crawl unprotected across open fields while gaseous clouds floated down on him and the other men with little to no medical attention. When the trial ended, Edwards was told never to speak of what had happened to him or he’d face 40 years in prison. He readily agreed, knowing that his claustrophobia would make life in a cell unbearable.
[Rollins] Edwards had no idea what happened to the other men in the study group. He rejoined his unit and was sent overseas with the Army’s 1329th Engineers, seeing duty in Europe and in the Pacific. The decay of his skin, however, had just begun.
Decades later, Edwards’ involvement would finally be acknowledged in 1993, when declassified government documents were released proving that military leaders had deliberately used their own soldiers to test the effects of exposure to mustard gas and other agents. As many as 60,000 enlisted men were subjected to similar such experiments, later investigations showed, though it’s widely accepted they primarily targeted black GIs, along with Puerto Rican and Japanese-American minorities as well.
Edwards, though, is one of the few in the test who survive.
While such tests were no doubt intended to provide the basis for developing treatment for victims (military and civilian) of chemical warfare, the official approach towards the test subjects recalls not just Tuskegee but some of the ‘medical’ experiments in the concentration camps. You have to wonder about the role of the physicians involved. No informed consent and, more importantly, no effort to inform VA and civilian doctors about what had been done.