This is John Batchelor. This is an excerpt from a conversation with my colleague Colonel Jeff

McCausen, United States Army Retired, CBS News. His memory of his Gulf War participation,

this is February, January, February, March of 1991.

At issue is the decision by the Iraqi Retreated Defeated Army to set oil wells of fire and spread that

poisonous smoke across the whole terrain breathed in by the US and Allied troops who were stationed there at the edge of Kuwait as the Iraqis

collapsed.

They continued to breathe it for weeks afterwards and Jeff tells a very convincing story of something's wrong.

Something's very wrong with what happened. That was a war crime. What Saddam did and Iraq did and what Iraq did and reviewing those events

that was enough to close that sovereign power down but it did not happen. The Gulf War II and

O3 was the second part and then the Gulf, the Iraqi occupation was the third part.

Now today Iraq continues in the news and it's all very sad about

the decline in fall of Iraq over decades but the initial contact was the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein

and his lieutenants. In August and September of 1990, that led to the response by the United Nations and

42 nations led by the US to recapture, to retake Kuwait, to liberate Kuwait and then stop at the border of Iraq, the oil wells

of fire across the landscape. Here's Jeff to explain what it was like and what it means all

these decades later to the men and women who served there.

Jeff McCausen.

I talked to some of my guys and there's the real question of the so-called Gulf War Syndrome or Gulf War effects.

Several of my guys have manifested some problems.

Other things were caused, some believed,

by the experimental vaccines that we took in some cases to protect us against various types of

bio-warfare that the Iraqis might use.

...