Serve, Suffer, Submit Your DNA: How America Turned Its Veterans Into a Lifetime Experiment

For decades, as if there are no consequences beyond potential death or dismemberment on the battlefield, our service members are asked to put their bodies on the line. What they aren’t told—what the government has known and consistently failed to disclose—is that the enemy isn’t always on the other side of the battlefield. Sometimes the enemy is within. It is in the water they drink, the air they breathe, the chemicals sprayed around their bases, and the vaccines injected into their arms without consent or adequate safety data. A new study makes that reality impossible to ignore.

The study, published last month in Psychiatry Research, pulled data from 248,926 veterans enrolled in the Million Veteran Program—and what it found should be front-page news across the nation. Why? Because the more toxic exposure a veteran carried, the more likely they were to have experienced suicidal thoughts and behaviors. That alarming connection held true across every military era—pre-Vietnam, Vietnam, Gulf War, post-9/11. All of them. And the substances driving that connection? Agent Orange. Chemical and biological weapons. The anthrax vaccine. Solvents, fuels, petroleum combustion products, lead, pesticides, and open-air burn pits. In other words, things that the military deployed, mandated, or simply left its people to breathe in without a second thought.

This is not a new problem. It is a very old one that keeps getting rediscovered.

A History Written in Illness
Agent Orange. The name alone carries the weight of a generation of veterans who came home from Vietnam sick, dying, and told for years that their cancers and neurological disorders had nothing to do with the herbicide they waded through in the jungle. The VA fought those claims for decades. The connections were hard-won and decades in the making, as one investigative outlet put it—and the post-9/11 generation exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan is now in the same fight Vietnam veterans were in forty years ago.

At Camp Lejeune, Marines and their families drank water contaminated with trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, benzene, and vinyl chloride from 1953 to 1987—thirty-four years of poisoned tap water on a U.S. military base, while officials looked the other way. Between 25 and 32 percent of Gulf War veterans suffer from Gulf War Illness, a condition marked by chronic symptoms directly linked to chemical exposure in theater. Burn pits—essentially open-air incinerators used to dispose of everything from medical waste to plastics to unexploded ordnance—blanketed troops in toxic smoke for years across Iraq and Afghanistan. PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals” found in military firefighting foam, have contaminated groundwater near U.S. bases across the country, with 3M settling for $10.3 billion in 2024 to fund cleanup—not compensation for the people whose bodies absorbed those chemicals while serving.

It is the same story every time. Exposure happens, veterans get sick, the government spends years disputing the connection, and by the time a law gets passed and benefits start flowing, another generation is already being poisoned by something new.

The Mental Health Toll Nobody Wants to Talk About
Last December, a review published in Medical Care mapped the existing research on military toxic exposures and psychiatric outcomes. The picture it painted was ugly. Depression, PTSD, anxiety, sleep disorders, psychosis symptoms, neurocognitive damage—all of it showing up at disproportionate rates in veterans with documented chemical exposures. Seven studies tied sleep problems specifically to pesticide and chemical weapons exposure. Three found links to psychosis, two of those focused on Vietnam veterans who had been soaked in Agent Orange.

We have no shortage of veteran mental health campaigns. Hotlines. Awareness months. Plenty of “thank you for your service.” What we don’t do nearly enough is look at what was put into these men and women’s bodies—usually without their full knowledge, sometimes without any knowledge at all—and ask what that did to their minds. The PACT Act of 2022 expanded VA health care eligibility for veterans with toxic exposure conditions. It was overdue. But a benefits expansion is not the same thing as someone being held responsible.

The Bigger Question
Mustard gas testing in World War II. Radiation during nuclear weapons tests. Agent Orange in Vietnam. Anthrax vaccines pushed on troops before the Gulf War without anything resembling full informed consent. Thirty-four years of contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. Two decades of burn pit smoke in the Middle East. PFAS soaking into the ground around domestic bases from coast to coast. Each time, the institutional response has been the same—deny it, dispute it, wait out the sick and the dying, and eventually offer a settlement that cleans up the water while the people who drank it spend the rest of their lives filling out claims forms.

And then, at the heart of it all, there is the Million Veteran Program (MVP). Launched in 2011, it has now enrolled over one million veterans in what the VA calls a national research program studying how genes, lifestyle, military experiences, and exposures affect veteran health. Long overdue accountability, they’d have us believe. But sit with that for a moment. The institution that created the exposures is now collecting the DNA of the people it exposed.

The same institution that spent decades exposing service members to Agent Orange, contaminated water, experimental anthrax vaccines, burn pit smoke, and mandated mRNA shots is now collecting the DNA of one million of those same people—and studying how their genetic makeup interacts with the very exposures the military caused. The VA openly states that approved outside partners can apply for access to MVP data. Who those partners are, and what they intend to do with a genetic database of one million chemically exposed veterans, is not a question the program’s website answers.

Given what we now know about epigenetics—the science of how environmental exposures alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence—and given what we know about mRNA technology and its capacity to instruct cells to produce proteins they were never meant to make, the question writes itself. Were these service members test subjects before the study began? Because the research being conducted on their DNA now sure looks like the follow-up work.

We keep thanking our soldiers for their service. But that is not enough. Maybe we should start by telling them what that service has actually cost them—and who will benefit from it long after they are gone.