NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — They helped lead the fight to expand medical benefits for Gulf War Veterans.
Retired Chief Warrant Officer Jimmy Williams, 65, was one of the first Fort Campbell soldiers referred to Vanderbilt Dr. Robert Miller because he was suffering from mysterious breathing problems.
"I feel honored and privileged to work with Dr. Miller and what he's done for us. He never ever quit," Williams said.
Williams oversaw helicopters for the 101st Airborne and served four tours in Iraq.
He began having shortness of breath after his first tour in 2003.
"I was gaging, throwing up blood, couldn't hardly breath, couldn't hardly run," Williams said.
But Army doctors could not find anything wrong with him.
"The doctor at Fort Campbell said 'you need to go see Dr. Miller,'" Williams said.
That began a relationship that eventually led to the two testifying before Congress about the need to expand medical benefits for Veterans suffering from damaged lungs connected to their service.
"I have a whole new perspective for military service that I never had before this," Dr. Miller said.
Like many Gulf War veterans, Williams went for years without medical benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs to help with his condition.
But Williams is now eligible for benefits because of the PACT Act, officially called the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, which became law in August.
It expanded VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances.
"It's taken 15 to 18 years to get there, and all the evidence has been there for years," Williams said. "I think the delays were about the money."
The battle over burn pits is one NewsChannel 5 Investigates has followed for more than a decade.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates first interviewed Dr. Miller shortly after he started treating Fort Campbell soldiers.
"We saw our first patient in 2004. They were referred from Fort Campbell with unexplained shortness of breath," Dr. Miller said.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked, "You came up with the answer, but the Army didn't like the answer."
He responded, "I think that's right."
Dr. Miller ordered a controversial test, a lung biopsy, that showed the small passageways in soldiers' lungs were badly damaged.
He told NewsChannel 5 Investigates in a 2012 interview that the Army was pushing back against his findings.
"The Department of Defense has not embraced this issue," Dr. Miller said in 2012.
The Army stopped sending soldiers to him and instead started using other doctors, who could not find anything wrong with the soldiers' lungs.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked in 2012, "Why do you think they stopped sending them to you?"
Dr. Miller responded, "I don't think they wanted the soldiers to undergo the biopsies we were performing."
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked, "Why not?"
Dr. Miller said, "I think it gave some legitimacy to this that they did not want to give."
But ten years after that interview, Dr. Miller was one of the people invited to the White House to attend the signing of PACT Act.
Williams said every time he was deployed in Iraq he worked near burn pits, which are areas where the military burned trash.
"We just dug a big hole in the ground and just started burning everything. It didn't matter what it was," Williams said.
"I would wake up at night choking and gaging and everything you owned had black soot on it," Williams said.
Now that breathing problems connected to burn pits are covered, Dr. Miller wants to make sure the PACT Act money is spent properly, and Veterans get the medical help they deserve.
"We need to make sure that a lot of side projects or bureaucratic issues don't get in the way of actually helping people," Dr. Miller said. "In the end, there will be tens of thousands of people presenting with respiratory disorders."
Dr. Miller compared burn pits to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.
He said that took 40 years for the military to recognize.
Burn pits took 18 years, so in comparison, this was better.
