The U.S. Department of Defense admitted earlier this week to conducting mustard gas experiments on minority American soldiers during World War II. Declassified documents indicated in 1993 that 60,000 soldiers took part "willingly," according to NPR.
The experiments were conducted on African-American, Puerto Rican and Japanese-Americans while using white soldiers as a control. The purpose of the experiments was to discover if mustard gas had different effects on skin based on pigmentation. Their hope was to find an "ideal chemical soldier," NPR reported.
Rollins Edwards, one of the soldiers who took part in the experiments, portrayed the toll the gas took on his body. "It took all the skin off your hands. Your hands just rotted."
Nowadays, Edwards keeps a jar full of the flakes that continue to fall off his skin to illustrate his tale.
Interestingly enough, the Pentagon did admit to conducting Mustard Gas experiments in 1991 but never disclosed that the subjects were based on race until recently, NBC News reported.
When the story first broke in in the early 1990s, the Department of Veteran Affairs made a promise to locate the veterans who participated in the worst parts of the experiments and compensate them. Several veterans interviewed by NPR said that the VA has failed to keep their promise.
While the VA claimed to only be able to contact 610 veterans over the course of 20 years, investigators from NPR were able to locate 1,200 of those same veterans in just two months.
