Free The Nirvana Plague by Gary Glass Page A

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    There were dozens of Situation Reports like this one from COs and field doctors in various theatres, from Argentina to Pakistan. Medical reports from forward hospitals gave the symptoms in more clinical terms, but not much more useful detail. Subsequent psychiatric evaluations from base hospitals shed little additional light. He read through a few of the patient charts carefully, comparing the daily notes and observations against the conclusions and diagnoses. Symptoms and observations clearly supported the conclusions drawn. He didn’t get it.
    Benford read the skepticism in his face. “You don’t look too impressed.”
    “I mean, these cases look like pretty straightforward stress reactions to me. Though the incidence is pretty high.”
    “Extraordinarily high, don’t you think?”
    “Even so, I don’t see how you’re making the connection.”
    “With IDD?”
    “Yes.”
    “What are you looking at now?” She tapped into his screen from her own and glanced at what he’d been reading. “Yeah, this stuff is no good. None of these doctors think they’re dealing with anything out of the ordinary. They’re just seeing what they’re used to seeing.”
    “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean they’re seeing wrong.”
    She pointed him to another container in the database and popped it open. “Take a look at some of that stuff.” She turned her attention back to her own work.
    Marley saw that she’d led him to a folder full of videos — recordings of patient interviews. Over a hundred of them. He wished he’d spotted these before — before he called her judgment into question. Sticking a bean-size earphone in his ear, he punched one up at random. Almost as soon as it started, he began to see things Benford’s way.
    The video showed a young woman being interviewed in a clinical setting. The similarity to his IDD cases was unmistakable. The same halting, hesitant speech patterns, drifting unfocused attention, indifference to the interviewer’s concerns, and sudden startling outbursts of sharp commentary.
    He only watched a couple of minutes of it, then flipped to a different recording. The next one was with three enlisted men at a field hospital. Attached notes specified that they’d all begun manifesting symptoms on the same shift. One of them was wounded, but not seriously. Again the echoes of IDD were readily apparent.
    Benford tapped his knee, and he looked up.
    “See what I mean?”
    “Yes,” he confessed. “But.”
    “What?”
    “But how you did you make the connection to my write-up in the Journal ? Looking at these videos, it’s clear to me there are similarities. But how—”
    “How did I catch on? Well, you’ve seen how many cases? Five? I’ve seen over a hundred. Frankly, we’ve been waiting for it to appear in the civilian population. We were looking for it.”
    “We?”
    “Those who think, as I do, that there’s more to this than garden-variety stress reaction.”
    “How many of you are there?”
    “Including myself, there’s one.”
    “But somebody believes it enough that they authorized you to put together this taskforce.”
    “Just barely. Basically, the only reason why they were willing to authorize me to pursue this thing is that they don’t like the answers they got from the original investigation. That’s what I was telling you in the car earlier. The JCS wants a better answer.”
    “Better?”
    “More politically palatable. Nobody wants to attribute these incidents to cowardice or weakness.”
    “They wanted a better answer, so you got the job.”
    “I asked for the job.”
    “That’s what I don’t understand. You’re not a psychiatrist or psychologist, right? So—”
    “No, I’m not. That’s why you’re here. I’m just a lowly Health Affairs officer. My specialty is epidemiology. But I started out as an Army field medic in the Middle Eastern theatre. — It’s all in there. You have dossiers on everyone on the team, and they have yours, of