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John Ismay was in the business of tracking explosives and bombs in surge-era Iraq. His first week there introduced him to an open secret: Coalition forces routinely found chemical weapons, and within a month, a soldier in his unit suffered a mustard blister on his leg the size of his hand.

I was amazed I was never told about M-110 rounds before I got there, Ismay says, referring to the chemical artillery rounds manufactured to produce a toxic effect on personnel and to contaminate habitable areas. I never heard about guys who got hit by mustard and sarin.

As a U.S. Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, Ismay spent a lot of time thinking about the improvised explosives killing coalition troops. He put in long hours at operations centers, studying reports and looking for patterns set by insurgent bomb-makers to help soldiers find IEDs with their eyes and not their bodies. Chemical weapons like nerve agents and mustard were an afterthought when improvised explosives were the number-one killer of troops in Iraq. Yet at the same time, Iraqi and American soldiers recovered thousands of chemical munitions mostly in secret for three years before Ismay deployed to Iraq, leaving his troops and countless others to a grim lottery of sorting through damaged shells that might have led to paralysis by sharing the same air.

The landmark two-year New York Times investigation on the Iraq Wars secret chemical weapons casualties sits at the intersection of multiple daunting obstacles for journalists: military leaders who suppressed information from the public, injured war veterans who are skeptical of reporters, and dense webs of technical details in need of expert analysis. At the center was a team of three veteransIsmay, New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers, and videographer Mac Bishopwhose own services played a considerable part in reporting one of the biggest untold stories of the Iraq War.

What they uncovered was astonishing: U.S. and Iraqi forces had secretly recovered about 5,000 chemical weapons during the eight-year war, with the first report documenting 17 American and seven Iraqi soldiers injured by mustard and nerve agentsincluding the only documented battlefield exposures to a nerve agent in U.S. military history. The Pentagon, later prompted by the story, revealed the number wounded as higher than 600. High-ranking officials reportedly engaged in subterfuge to downplay and conceal the danger to U.S. troops, and official recognition is nearly nonexistent. Purple Hearts awarded by Army Secretary Pete Geren were rescinded in one case due to convoluted rules of what defines enemy action with chemical weapons. Lifelong medical care will likely be necessary for the troops exposed, but that will be difficult in the Veterans Affairs system, which requires documentation to treat and compensate service-related injuries. In most cases for troops wounded by chemical weapons in Iraq, that documentation was aggressively avoided.

As Ismay finished his service commitment with the Navy in 2010, he read a New York Times piece detailing the complex origins of weapons found inside a Taliban gun locker. He then began corresponding with C.J. Chivers, the papers longtime conflict and arms reporter who wrote the piece. Ismay calls him Chris, but for seven years ending in 1994, he was Captain Chivers, a Marine infantry officer who served in the Gulf War.

Ismay couldnt satisfy what he calls a morbid curiosity about the origins of the chemical weapons found in Iraq. His research stalled due to lack of evidence and Pentagon documentation, and he put his work in a drawer until Chivers came to him on the same subject. Chivers was following murmurs that chemical weapons designed by the West in the 1940s and used in the Iran-Iraq War were the same munitions that Americans and Iraqis were pulling out of weapons caches IED emplacements as recent as 2011.

This was basically an arms trade story, Chivers says. Initially, Pentagon officials were tin-eared to their requests on the types of chemical weapons injuring U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, and no one would go on record.

As the number of victims grew, as the number of collected munitions hit four figures, we realized we had a different story, Chivers says. It was no longer about the weapons. It was now about the men wounded by them. All they had to do was listen to their stories.

Of all the occupations wary of outsiders, combat troopsmen and women in an insular, competitive, and poorly understood culturemight be the most guarded. Its an undeniable hurdle confronting any journalist who must use veterans as sources and guides through complex stories.

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How Three Veterans Uncovered the Iraq War's Biggest Untold Story