PERSIAN GULF

Town Hall Meetings
The Special Assistant for Gulf war Illnesses holds regularly scheduled town hall meetings nationwide in order to meet with veterans face-to-face. In 1997, we conducted 13 town hall meetings, and attended four national conventions to update veterans on the progress of our investigation. The tentative schedule will posted on GulfLINK and published in GulfNEWS.

GulfLINK
The DoD GulfLINK home page (http:/www.gulflink.osd.mil) is the primary vehicle by which we make information and reports immediately available to veterans and the American public.  GulfLINK continues to contain reports, transcripts of press conferences, Congressional testimonies and declassified health related documents. News articles now provide a convenient way to keep up with
the activities of the Office of the Special Assistant, and an e-mail capability has been added.  GulfLINK has been a great success.  Typically, we received 60,000 home page "hits" in any given week during important times, such as when the results of our analysis of fallout from the explosions at Khamisiyah were announced. We are very proud that GulfLINK was recently awarded the Government Computer News Agency Award for excellence in the application of information technology to improve services delivery.

E-mail
E-mail is especially helpful in enabling us to communicate with our service members and veterans overseas. Having this two-way method of communication enables our staff to provide more personal and timely responses. The informality and shortened response time encourages a continuous dialogue between our staff and the veterans. Since first initiated on March 29, 1997, we have received more than 2,600 e-mail inquiries as of January 1998. If you want to communicate directly with us by e-mail, just send your comments to Send Email

GulfNEWS
We recognize that many veterans do not have Internet access and, to reach them, we developed a bi-monthly newsletter, GulfNEWS, with a current circulation of more than 7,000 and growing. GulfNEWS is produced by The Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses, 5113 Leesburg Pike, Suite 901, Falls Church, VA 22041. To be placed on the mailing list, write to the above address or e-mail Send Email