Navy vet who spurred federal
inquiry on mustard gas dies
PHOTO PROVIDED
At 17, Glenn Jenkins was the typical teenage serviceman who sailed off to war during World War II. Hardly old enough to shave, Jenkins was homesick for Venice and volunteered to take part in a secret assignment to get 11 days' leave to come home. After signing up, he learned the secret duty was to be a guinea pig in a Navy gas chamber.
PHOTO PROVIDED
Glenn Jenkins, left, and then-U.S. Congressman Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in June 1990 on the Navy’s use of mustard gas testing in World War II.
In 1945, Glenn Jenkins was a 17-year-old sailor who grew up in Nokomis and joined the Navy near the end of World War II. After graduation from boot camp in Bainbridge, Md., he volunteered for a secret Naval mustard gas experiment that made him the focal point of a headline-grabbing Congressional investigation in Washington on the military’s misconduct more than half a century later.
Jenkins died Feb. 19 at the age of 85.
