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\u2019d face 40 years in prison. He readily agreed, knowing that his claustrophobia would make life in a cell unbearable.<\/p>\n
[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\u2019s 1329th Engineers, seeing duty in Europe and in the Pacific. The decay of his skin, however, had just begun.<\/p>\n
Decades later, Edwards\u2019 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\u2019s widely accepted they primarily targeted black GIs, along with Puerto Rican and Japanese-American minorities as well.<\/p>\n
Edwards, though, is one of the few in the test who survive.<\/p>\n