GULF WAR GIS POSSIBLY EXPOSED TO NERVE GAS.

Byline: Michael E. Ruane Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The Pentagon revealed for the first time Friday that American soldiers may have been exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons in the weeks after the close of the Gulf War.

Several hundred men from a North Carolina-based Army engineer battalion were in an area where a demolition team blew up a bunker that may have contained Iraqi rockets tipped with the nerve agent sarin and a mustard blistering agent.

Pentagon spokesmen said U.N. inspectors reported five years ago to the U.S. government that the area may have contained chemical weapons, but the report was not assessed and verified until last month.

Officials said they have begun trying to locate and interview those who served with the battalion - the 37th Engineers - in the war. They said they have contacted some but not all members. Those reached so far have not reported any ill effects, Defense officials said.

Sarin, known to U.S. experts as nerve agent GB, is often an odorless straw-colored liquid that is related to insecticides. It is highly toxic in liquid and in the vapor that can be created through detonation of a munition. It causes death through paralysis of the respiratory system.

It was sarin that was recently used by terrorists to poison commuters in a Japanese subway.

U.S. experts have said there are several kinds of mustard agents, many of which have a garliclike odor and are related to the mustard gas that was used during World War I. Mustard gas causes skin and membrane damage.

Thousands of GIs have come forward since the 1991 war complaining of a host of ailments that have come to be known collectively as Gulf War Syndrome.

Despite large government medical studies, investigative committees and examinations of tens of thousands of soldiers and their family members, no cause has been discovered.

American officials have maintained consistently that Iraq, though it had planned to, did not use any of the chemical or biological weapons in its arsenal on coalition troops during the war.

And the United States also said - up until Friday - that there was no evidence that American troops were exposed to Iraq's chemical weapons.

The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, explained in a hastily called and somewhat confused briefing late Friday that the incident occurred in early March 1991.

Demolition and chemical weapons experts from the battalion, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., were in the process of destroying a large Iraqi ammunition depot at a place called Kamisiyah, northwest of Basra and about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Bacon, standing before a circuit-board diagram of the depot, said there had been reports that chemical weapons had been stored in the area and the demolition experts approached the area in protective suits and armed with chemical sensors.

But the sensors detected no chemicals, the experts removed their protective gear and proceeded to blow up the bunkers. Troops from the unit were about three miles away when the bunkers exploded. Bacon said that during the demolition, sensors were also used and detected no chemical agents.

``The troops who destroyed that bunker were trained demolition experts, accompanied by chemical weapons experts,'' Bacon said. ``They were unaware, at the time, that the bunker contained rockets with chemical agents.

``They had inspected the bunker with chemical detectors, prior to its destruction, and found no evidence of chemical agents. Detectors in use during the destruction also did not confirm the presence of chemical agents.''

The bunker in question was bunker 73, he said.

Dr. Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said there were no reports of illness at the time from the soldiers in the area.

``If there were any acute health effects from those troops who were closest - the engineers - from either mustard or sarin, we . . . would have known it then,'' he said. ``We have no record of anything being noticed at that time. We will continue to look forward, but I think we would have known it.''

The following fall, however, U.N. inspectors examined the site and found destroyed Iraqi rockets that contained the kind of lining often used in chemical weapons projectiles and traces of the agents, the officials said.

Bacon said the information was forwarded to the U.S. government. ``We had a report to the government,'' he said. ``But remember, we had - we have - a lot of papers about the Gulf War, about Desert Storm.''