Photography by Derek Hudson Text by Kenneth Miller Reporting by Jimmie Briggs
Jayce Hanson's birth defects may stem from his father's Gulf War service. But like hundreds of other families, the Hansons face official stonewalling--and a frightening future.
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.htmlFlying kites with his sister, Amy, he displays a fierce determination. "He's a problem solver," says his father, Paul. Jayce suffers from a syndrome similar to that of the thalidomide babies of the 1950s. But his mother, Connie, took no drugs.
rom outside, the evil that has invaded Darrell and Shana Clark's home is invisible. Set on a modest plot in a San Antonio subdivision, equipped with a doghouse and a swimming pool, the house is a shrine to the pursuit of happiness--a ranch-style emblem of the good life Darrell and 700,000 other U.S. soldiers fought for in the Persian Gulf four years ago.
Inside, the evil shows itself at once. It has taken up residence in the body of the Clarks' three-year-old daughter, Kennedi.
On a Saturday afternoon, Darrell and Shana huddle in their paneled living room. They are in their mid-twenties, robust and suntanned, but their eyes are older. Kennedi toddles about, pretending to snap pictures. You see the evil's imprint when she lowers the toy camera: Her face is grotesquely swollen, sprinkled with red, knotted lumps.
Kennedi was born without a thyroid. If not for daily hormone treatments, she would die. What disfigures her features, however, is another congenital condition: hemangiomas, benign tumors made of tangled blood vessels. Since she was a few weeks old, they have been popping up all over--on her eyelids and lips; in her throat and spinal canal. Laser surgery shrinks them, but they return again and again. They distort her speech, threaten her life. And, inevitably, they draw the stares of strangers. "When people see her," says Shana, "they say, 'Ooh, what happened to your baby?'"