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“I was exposed to nerve agent on Okinawa” – US soldier sickened by chemical weapon leak at Chibana Ammunition Depot in 1969 breaks silence on what happened that day.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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On July 8 1969, 19-year old US soldier Daniel Plemons was working at Chibana Ammunition Depot, Okinawa, in one of the most dangerous – and secretive – jobs in the US military: the maintenance of chemical weapons.
“There were 500-pound (227 kg) bombs filled with nerve agent and we were sandblasting the old paint off them before repainting and stenciling their markings. Our team had finished around 25 – then I started having trouble breathing and my vision became strange. Thinking it was just the dust, I stepped outside for a moment but when I went back inside, everybody was gone. I found them out the back of the building and they yelled at me to inject myself with my automatic spring-loaded antidote. I injected it into my upper thigh. It hurt – but that's what saved my life.”
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Notes
1 A brief summary of the incident was first reported ten days later by Wall Street Journal. “Nerve gas accident - Okinawa mishap bares overseas deployment of chemical weapons,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1969.
2 Until 1970, it was standard operating procedure for the US military – and other countries' militaries – to dump chemical weapons at sea; often no records of such dumps were kept. For example, see: Ian Wilkinson, “Chemical Weapon Munitions Dumped at Sea: An Interactive Map,” James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, August 1, 2017.
3 For an official account of what happened that day at Chibana, see Richard A. Hunt, Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military 1969–1973, Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington DC, 2015, p. 337.
4 Hunt, Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military, p.341.
5 For a wider discussion of Operation Red Hat, see Jon Mitchell, “Operation Red Hat: Chemical weapons and the Pentagon smokescreen on Okinawa,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 30, No. 1. August 5, 2013.
6 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Relocation of Chemical Munitions from Okinawa (Operation ‘RED HAT‘)”, JCS Official Record, January 15, 1970.
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