Word: kayes
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...Larry Kay will never forget the night of the white cloud. On Jan. 20, 1991, three days after the Gulf War had started, Kay was dozing in an armchair at his construction battalion's camp in Saudi Arabia, more than 100 miles from the Kuwaiti border. At 3 a.m. an exploding Scud missile jolted him awake. Before Kay had time to clamp on his gas mask, the acrid smell of ammonia assaulted his lungs, and he watched a whitish gray cloud drift over the camp. Says he: "Right after that, people started getting sick...
Members of the battalion developed large red blotches on their hands and arms. Within a week, Kay felt tired almost all the time. Since then he has suffered chronic diarrhea, aches in all his joints and has difficulty breathing -- symptoms that have bedeviled many of the Seabees who served with Kay in the Persian Gulf. "These guys have been miserable for the past two years, and they weren't having any of these problems before that," says Charles Jackson, a physician at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tuskegee, Alabama. Last month, after running many tests on Kay and researching...
...Veterans Affairs Department has since downplayed Jackson's diagnosis. But Kay, a 52-year-old fireman from Columbus, Georgia, who served on reserve duty, is not getting well. In fact, he is more convinced than ever that he must have been exposed to disease-causing chemical agents while serving in the gulf. Several veterans and their families testified before a congressional committee last week that the Defense Department has either ignored their complaints or dismissed the troops who make them as malingerers...
Thirty years later, the now much older Arlis Sweeney still hears the crying of that baby in his nightmares. Arlis deals novelty vending machines in Texas, travelling from site to site in his pickup and sleeping in road-side motels. Fate brings him together wit a runaway housewife, Kay Davies (Meg Ryan), with whom he eventually falls in love and takes on as a travelling-companion and lover. It is only when he discovers that Kay is that baby whose family his father slaughtered so long ago that the entire gravitas of the situation propels the story crazily forward...
Quaid plays the role with an intense restraint and pained disposition which conveys the total psychological damage done to him by his father, and his own personal battle to distinguish himself from Roy's actions. Meg Ryan as Kay Davies is the focus of the father-son struggle, and remains a simplistic character completely oblivious to what is happening around her. Her sparkling wide-eyed stare and innocent dialogue provide an effective counterweight to the heavy dynamic of the plot which revolves around...