Major Doug Rokke PhD Education, University of Illinois, 1992, served in the Vietnam War in the USAF as an avionics technician. He then served in the Illinois National Guard where he was decorated for saving the lives of accident victims he found alongside the road on his way home from a monthly drill. First Lieutenant Douglas Rokke was activated for the Gulf War and served predominantly in Riyadh. After the Gulf War, he was attached to a team headed by a senior Army civilian employee that was involved in assessing armored vehicles hit by depleted uranium armored penetrators. After he completed his doctoral degree, he was activated to serve a voluntary active duty tour at the US Army Chemical School, Fort McClellan, Alabama, where he was the liaison officer with a contractor who was preparing training materials about Depleted Uranium. As a GS-13 civilian employee, Rokke directed instruction at this school. He was terminated from that employment while on probation. Rokke commonly refers to this period of work as his being the Director of the Army's depleted uranium program. Rokke has exaggerated that as well as most other aspects of his involvement with the Army and Depleted Uranium.

He has become a prominent critic of the use of depleted uranium, after viewing the armored vehicles hit by depleted uranium munitions. Rokke has no first hand knowledge of any sickness or other other physical or genetic affects of depleted uranium. Rokke does falsely assert that radiological protective suits and masks are not adequate protection. Rokke has no proof of those statements, but they are widely made on the internet and have swayed many opinions. Rokke also falsely claims that members of the team that Rokke claims to have led have died from exposure to depleted uranium. This is false. None of the members of his team have become ill let alone died because of exposure to depleted uranium. In various Internet interviews, Rokke's credentials are said to include a Ph.D. in Health Physics. This is not true. He does have a Ph.D. but it is in education, not physics. Rokke did not become sick in 1991 when he returned to the United States; sick soldiers do not continue in their careers even in the Army Reserve and certainly would not be called to voluntary active duty. Rokke has given many interviews in which he leads the interviewer astray and he has appeared in the grossly inaccurate film Beyond Treason.

Rokke's actual military records and doctoral thesis have been posted to theveteran2@yahoogroups.com and teachnonviolence@yahoogroups.com. Anyone can also request the military records using the Standard Form 180 and the process detailed at the Department of Veterans Affairs website http://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records/.
This site gives instructions to submit a SF 180 - Request Pertaining to Military Records. Rokke's doctoral thesis is available in the University of Illinois Library at Champaign-Urbana.

People who are interested in Douglas Lind Rokke should research the real Douglas Lind Rokke, not the one that Rokke and his activist disciples have painted him to be. They are entirely different people.

External links

What the US Military knew about DU and when (MP3)

The War Against Ourselves (Interview Transcript)

DU:Nuclear Holocaust and The Politics of Radiation (MP3)