by Mike Magner
“I wanted to go to Vietnam—it was a revenge motive,” he said. “But in 1970 we were starting to pull out.” Ensminger ended up as a mechanic assigned to Camp Johnson, one of the ancillary bases at Camp Lejeune, where he worked on equipment that was used in training Marines to drive military vehicles. Then he was sent to Okinawa, Japan, as part of the support teams for bombing runs to Vietnam and Cambodia. It was there that he met Etsuko Asako, who was working in the Navy mess hall, and the two dated for a year and a half while Ensminger was assigned to the base. After filing scores of documents required by both the Marine Corps and the Japanese government, including a translated transcript of Asako’s family history, the couple was married and had a daughter in Okinawa.
When he got orders to return to Camp Lejeune in 1973, Ensminger was a sergeant in the 8th Engineer Battalion, “but even with a sergeant’s pay it was shit housing,” he said. His family initially rented a trailer on the base, but as soon as better quarters became available in Tarawa Terrace, Ensminger broke his lease and moved his wife and baby there. It was in Tarawa Terrace in 1975 that Etsuko became pregnant with the girl they would name Janey.
Jerry Ensminger volunteered for the drill field around that time and went to the boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, for training. Since he could end up anywhere after his graduation as a drill instructor, his wife would remain at Camp Lejeune until she found out where the family would move next. As it turned out, she was on the base for almost two months of Janey’s first trimester of development.
On December 19, 1975, Ensminger graduated and was assigned to stay at Parris Island. He immediately headed north to Camp Lejeune to pick up his pregnant wife and daughter. When he arrived, Etsuko was working hard to clean out their quarters so it would pass the series of inspections the Marine Corps required before anyone could move out. But Jerry Ensminger was anxious to have his family back together again. “I said to hell with it and hired a company to clean it that guaranteed you’d pass inspection,” he said. “There was a payoff of course; they operated with kick-backs. I just wanted to get out of there.”
At Parris Island, twenty-three-year-old Master Sergeant Ensminger was in the best condition—both physically and mentally—of his life. “I had muscles in my shit,” he laughed. And he knew how to work recruits, berating them during the rigorous drills with favorite phrases, such as “Did your mother have any children who lived?” and “You are a paraplegic piece of pig shit!”
Janey Ensminger was born on July 30, 1976, at the Buford Naval Hospital near Parris Island. The baby girl seemed perfectly normal, though she never crawled—she rolled, her father said. “She learned to get up on her knees and rolled to the left.” By the time the family moved back to Camp Lejeune in 1982, she was a precocious, fun-loving, and very active child. The Ensmingers moved into a house off the base at the time, but Jerry and Etsuko frequently took Janey and her two sisters (another daughter, Veronica, had also been born at Parris Island) to use the swimming pools at Camp Lejeune.
The problems began in the late spring and early summer of 1983, around the same time the Ensmingers were planning a trip to Pennsylvania for the wedding of Jerry’s sister. Janey, a few months shy of seven years old, came down with a case of strep throat that she couldn’t seem to shake. “We were going to cancel the trip to Pennsylvania, and then she got better, so we went,” Ensminger said. “But then in Carlyle I had to take her to the base hospital. She got worse.”
The family returned to North Carolina and Janey was still not feeling well. “I stayed home with her when we got back,” Ensminger said. “It was on a Sunday in July and she got really hot. I was putting cold compresses on her and when I took off her shirt I noticed little hickeys on her back.” Ensminger didn’t know what they were—he learned later they were petechiae caused by hemorrhaging beneath the skin—but he knew they were a bad sign, and he rushed Janey to the base hospital.
“It was crowded, on a Sunday, but luckily my battalion surgeon was on duty and he ordered blood work,” Ensminger said. “I could tell something was wrong, the way they were looking at her.”
After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, and with his patience wearing thin—“I was ready to leap over the desk to demand an explanation,” he said—the doctor finally called Ensminger back behind the counter while Janey was brought back into the waiting room with a Navy corpsman. The doctor said he had been waiting for the head of pediatrics to come but felt he couldn’t hold off any longer, Ensminger said. “Your daughter has leukemia,” the doctor told him.
“I went to my knees right there on the tile floor and my forehead hit the tile,” Ensminger said. “I started to sweat and shake. I was going into shock. The doctor got me up and I said, ‘I’ve got to get hold of myself.’ Janey was there with a female corpsman and I needed to go to her.”
Janey’s blood platelet count was very low. The hospital had to have a supply flown in so the girl could make it through the night. The next day, Jerry and his wife arranged to have their daughter transferred to the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, one of the military’s top medical facilities.
When the first state regulations for groundwater quality in North Carolina took effect in 1983, Rick Shiver of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources was charged with overseeing their implementation in Onslow County and other parts of the coastal region. Shiver had actually lived at Camp Lejeune as a boy from 1954 to 1963 while his father was stationed there, and he had made many visits back since joining the state agency in 1973, having been assigned to Onslow County in 1978. So he was well aware of the base’s operations and the fact that for decades a variety of hazardous materials had been dumped at numerous locations around the 220-square-mile installation. Julian Wooten and Danny Sharpe, the two environmental supervisors on the base in the 1970s, had even taken Shiver on a tour of many of these disposal sites in the mid-1970s.
It wasn’t until July 1984, though, that Camp Lejeune’s recently hired environmental engineer, Bob Alexander, showed Shiver the results of the 1980 and 1981 tests for trihalomethanes that indicated the presence of solvents in samples from the Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace water systems. Shiver was surprised that base officials hadn’t done anything since to try to pinpoint the source of the contaminants. The large water systems on the base were served by as many as thirty wells, and if a test for the entire system showed contamination, it was likely the amount was diluted by water from clean wells. “I would have tested the wells individually,” Shiver said.3
Bert Mundt, a water plant operator at Camp Lejeune from 1973 to 2004, didn’t find out about the tests until years later, but he was convinced that base officials knew some of the water contained potentially harmful levels of toxic chemicals in the early 1980s. “They were perfectly aware,” Mundt said in an interview. “They were just hoping it was diluted enough that it wouldn’t be a problem.” Base commanders didn’t want to know if individual wells were contaminated, Mundt said, as the general foreman, W. R. Price, had written in 1983 that any shutdowns would have made it very difficult to meet summer demands for water.
The top managers at Camp Lejeune also felt justified in not spending money to test each of the dozens of wells on the base because they believed that any problems would be found and addressed in the Navy’s environmental assessment and cleanup program, NACIP. After the initial assessment study, completed in 1982, which had identified more than seventy dumping sites on the base and recommended further assessment, the second phase, a verification study, was started in May 1984 by another Florida consulting firm, Environmental Science and Engineering, Inc., “to determine existence and possible migration of specific chemicals” at twenty-two locations at Camp Lejeune. “The objective of the verification step is to determine whether specific toxic and hazardous materials identified in the Initial Assessment Study, and possibly other contaminants, are present in concentrations considered to be hazardous,” according to the “work and safety plan” prepared
for the consultants by LANTDIV, which was overseeing NACIP at Camp Lejeune.4
A notice about the study was placed in a base newspaper, The Globe, in June 1984 so that residents would be prepared for workers in spacesuits digging around various sites at Camp Lejeune. The crews would be wearing protective gear, but “we do not expect to expose anyone to any contaminants,” advised Colonel M. G. Lilley, assistant chief of staff for facilities, in the article.5
In the meantime, Shiver of the state environmental department started snooping around on his own for possible sources of groundwater pollution. He noticed that within a short distance of one of the Tarawa Terrace wells that had tested positive for solvents, there were three cleaning establishments and a gas station that would have storage tanks for chemicals and fuel. It didn’t take long to identify the worst operation of the bunch. ABC One-Hour Cleaners, a thirty-year-old dry-cleaning service at 2127 Lejeune Boulevard, was directly across the highway from Tarawa Terrace. Shiver went to the service and asked the workers to show him around. “I observed solvent leaking from a big tank or its piping system and draining across a cement floor to a sump,” Shiver said in an interview with federal investigators in 2004. “The sump pumped the liquids to a septic field. I realized that ABC Cleaners was the probable source of contamination at Tarawa Terrace.” His suspicions were confirmed after three test wells were drilled and sampling showed that a plume of solvents in the groundwater, including tetrachloroethylene (or perchloroethylene, PCE), was migrating directly toward the housing area on the other side of the highway.6
At this point, some in the Marine Corps leadership thought all the water problems at Camp Lejeune had suddenly been solved. A commercial polluter was responsible for contamination moving into the base wells and would be forced to clean up the mess at its own expense. It didn’t take long for that bubble to burst.
On November 30, 1984, the environmental staff at Camp Lejeune received an urgent call from the Navy engineers at LANTDIV. A test on a drinking-water well very close to the Hadnot Point fuel farm showed the presence of benzene and several solvents. The levels found included 121 parts per billion for benzene, an astounding 1,600 ppb for trichloroethylene (TCE), 630 ppb for trans-1,2-dichloroethylene (or trans-1,2-DCE, a solvent contained in many products, including waxes and resins), and 24 ppb for 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane (1,1,2,2-TeCA, mostly found in oils and lubricants). The well was immediately shut down. But this time the problem could not be blamed on ABC Cleaners. Not only was the well far from the cleaning service, the benzene was a telltale sign of fuel in the water, not cleaning solvents.
Less than a week later, on December 6, 1984, LANTDIV provided test results on samples from seven other wells serving the Hadnot Point water system. One showed benzene at 720 ppb and both TCE and trans-1,2-DCE at levels above 300 ppb; another well had TCE at 230 ppb. Both of those wells were shut down. The other five wells had only small traces of solvents, including levels of methylene chloride, also known as dichloroethane (DCE), that were determined to be the result of laboratory contamination. But the findings at Hadnot Point were alarming enough for LANTDIV engineers and the base environmental staff to decide to have every water well at Camp Lejeune tested for volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, starting in January 1985.7
Those tests were barely under way one day in late January when the wife of Camp Lejeune’s chief of staff smelled fuel in her water at the officers’ housing on Paradise Point. The area was served by the Holcomb Boulevard water system, which also pumped water to housing areas at Berkeley Manor, Watkins Village, Hospital Point, Midway Park, and Stone Street. When maintenance workers checked the pumping station at Holcomb Boulevard, they discovered a fuel line leaking directly into a water tank, sending fuel throughout the system, including the tap water in the chief of staff’s quarters. If that didn’t get the attention of base commanders, nothing would.
Utility operators at the base, assuming that after LANTDIV’s December 6 report all the contaminated wells in the Hadnot Point system had been discovered and removed from service, shut down the Holcomb Boulevard system and replaced it with water from Hadnot Point, using a tie-in line that connected the two systems. The Hadnot Point water would be pumped into both systems for more than a week until the Holcomb Boulevard lines were flushed.
After several days of pumping from Hadnot Point, tests were conducted on water samples taken from taps throughout the Holcomb Boulevard system to make sure the fuel contamination was disappearing. What was found in samples pulled from drinking-water fountains at the Berkeley Manor Elementary School on January 31, 1985, was shocking: the solvent TCE was measured at more than 1,100 parts per billion.
The solvent had to be coming from the Hadnot Point system, and sure enough, another contaminated well was discovered there that had not been tested earlier. This one, located near an old dumpsite, would show levels of TCE at a whopping 18,900 parts per billion, DCE at more than 8,000 ppb, and PCE at around 400 ppb. Considering that three other contaminated wells were now shut down in Hadnot Point, and more than 1,000 ppb of TCE were still being found in a school’s drinking water because of this one well, it can only be assumed that levels of TCE in the drinking water from the Hadnot Point system may have been even higher when all four contaminated wells were online.
By now, all the top officials at Camp Lejeune knew they had a very serious problem that required immediate action. The results of tests conducted on all wells at the base rolled in during February and March, and a dozen wells had to be removed from service owing to the presence of volatile organic compounds: one in the Rifle Range system; one in the New River system serving the air station; two at Tarawa Terrace primarily containing PCE, the solvent that had leaked from ABC Cleaners; and eight in the Hadnot Point system containing benzene, TCE, and other VOCs.8
As expected, the well closures posed a difficult supply problem for the base managers. The loss of two wells at Tarawa Terrace, which had about 6,000 residents at the time, meant they would be short about 300,000 gallons per day during the spring and summer months when water was in highest demand, according to a March 1, 1985, memo by the assistant chief of staff for facilities at Camp Lejeune, Colonel M. G. Lilley. Lilley outlined seven different options for replacing the water, including having it hauled in by tanker trucks at a cost of about $2,000 a day or building a new well at Tarawa Terrace for about $80,000. Lilley also noted that the two contaminated wells could be turned on when needed “to maintain adequate water levels” at no cost to the base, but he warned that “the potential health hazards must be weighed against the need and cost of providing water from other sources.”9
It was ultimately decided that an auxiliary line would be built connecting the Holcomb Boulevard system to the Tarawa Terrace area. The line was to be completed by June 1985.
Meanwhile, Lilley began preparing a defense for not taking action years earlier when tests showed the presence of solvents in the water at Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace. Julian Wooten, the longtime environmental manager at Camp Lejeune who was demoted when engineer Bob Alexander arrived in the early 1980s, was assigned to write what was later described by critics of the base management as a “cover your ass” memo in March 1985. Wooten was told to contact Paul Hubbell, a top civilian official at Marine Corps headquarters, to gather information about standards existing in other places around the country for volatile organic chemicals in drinking water. “Mr. Hubbell expressed surprise at the lack of information,” Wooten wrote in his March 11, 1985, memo. The intended implication was that Camp Lejeune did not appear to be violating any regulations even if it had measurable levels of VOCs in its drinking water.10
A more telling sign that the Marine Corps was worried about its culpability for allowing contaminated wells to be used for years is that test results from numerous updates to the NACIP confirmation study of 1984 have been kept under wraps for decades. That study, conducted by Environmental Science and Engineering, Inc., “to determine existence and possible migration of specific chemicals”
at Camp Lejeune, was required to be updated on a monthly basis before the final report was issued in January 1985. The Globe, the newspaper on the base, had reported in June 1984 that as the report was being conducted that year, if any contaminants were discovered in the base water supply, “a review of alternatives will determine action necessary to meet health and environmental standards.” Presumably, the contractor was sampling all the wells at Hadnot Point during this time and reporting the results to Lejeune officials. But when the progress reports for 1984 were requested years later under the Freedom of Information Act, the Marine Corps said they had been destroyed in a 1999 warehouse fire for which the cause was never determined. As a result, test results from wells conducted in August, September, October, and November of 1984—just months before eight wells in Hadnot Point were shut down—have never been made public.11
Residents at Camp Lejeune—or at Tarawa Terrace, to be precise—were finally told about the water contamination on April 30, 1985, in a “Notice to Residents of Tarawa Terrace” from the base commander, Major General L. H. Buehl. The notice was later described by veteran congressional investigator Dick Frandsen as “one of the most outrageous things” about the military’s handling of the base’s water problems. “Two of the wells that supply Tarawa Terrace have had to be taken off line because minute (trace) amounts of several organic chemicals have been detected in the water,” the commanding general said in the signed notice. “There are no definitive State or Federal regulations regarding a safe level of these compounds, but as a precaution, I have ordered the closure of these wells for all but emergency situations when fire protection or domestic supply would be threatened.” The notice went on to encourage Tarawa Terrace residents to do all they could to reduce water usage during the upcoming warm months, such as flushing the toilet “only for sanitation purposes” and taking shorter showers. Car-washing on the base was banned, and lawn-watering was limited to a few hours on weekday mornings.12