Yesterday, Edward Adams was an X-File, but tomorrow he might be the critical link between the toxic plumes rising recklessly from U.S. Army installations in the war zone and the growing number of veterans crippled by unexplained nerve, heart, and respiratory damage back home.

That’s because unlike any other known case, according to advocates, Adams was recently told by a board of military doctors at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii that his health anomalies – including the appearance of countless holes or "cysts" riddling the tissue around his lungs and an aorta that has shrunk to half its normal size in three months – "probably is related to the exposure to burn pits in Iraq."

This is coming at a time when the Pentagon has so far maintained there are "no significant short or long-term health risks" from the massive burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, which incinerate, in open air, everything from medical waste to plastics, dining hall trash, rubber, lithium batteries, petroleum products, and hardware, causing a noxious, jet-black plume and huge clouds over the area.

Adams, 33, went into the Army just five years ago a healthy, athletic young man. Six months into his 15-month deployment to Iraq (his first and only one), he was getting by like an out of shape middle-aged couch potato. He told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that his breathing "just got worse and worse. I would run a quarter mile and I was just wasted. I was just done."

Describing the smell from the ominous pit at Camp Speicher where he was stationed as "just horrendous," he said he wasn’t the only one experiencing problems in his unit, but their queries about a possible connection to the black dragon went unanswered, even hastily dismissed, by base doctors. It wasn’t until doctors at Tripler Hospital began looking into his case that the grim consequences began to emerge.

After an MRI was scheduled to determine what exactly was causing Adams’ breathing problems, which got worse, not better, after returning home, his doctors called him immediately. "They told me my lungs were filled with hundreds of tiny holes," Adams said. "It looked completely different from anything they’ve ever seen before."

Maybe they'll get some relief from the courts, but don't hold your breath.... if you can still breathe.

The US companies being sued are KBR and Halliburton, who have a VERY cozy relationship with the Pentagon, Congress and the WH, so don't look for much, if anything, to come out of this lawsuit.

Thanks to Greg Bacon for the information and picture.