A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  Leonard said none of the claims had been addressed because of the “very complex scientific and medical issues” involved. “It is the Navy’s intention to wait for the ATSDR study to be completed in order to insure that we have the best scientific research available so we may thoroughly evaluate each and every claim on its own merits,” she said. “We truly believe this approach is in the best interests of both the claimants and the Department of the Navy.”

  Dingell, chairman of the full Energy and Commerce Committee, sat in for part of the subcommittee hearing and summed up the proceedings with a single statement. “I find myself somewhat troubled that the military—and I was an infantry man in World War II—doesn’t adhere to the maxim that the Marine Corps has, and that is that the Marines take care of their own,” he said.

  12

  “FLORIDA MAN HAS BREAST CANCER”

  They brought me a pink smock with flowers on it.

  —MIKE PARTAIN, SON OF US MARINE STATIONED AT CAMP LEJEUNE

  Born in 1968 to a Marine who was headed into the teeth of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Mike Partain aspired to a military career like his father and his grandfather. But in a perverse twist, it might well have been the very fact that he was born at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune that would block Partain from following that path.1

  Partain’s grandfather, Warren Partain Sr., had been a Marine in both World War II and Korea. He had enlisted in the Marines in 1939, largely to escape the hardscrabble life of farming and ranching in his hometown of Olney, Texas. He ended up on radio duty in Iceland when the war started, and then he was reassigned to the states as a communications officer. His son, Warren Jr., was born in 1943 on Parris Island, the Marine training base in South Carolina. At age seventeen Warren Jr. received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, signed by President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally. There was an eerie connection there. When Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Connally was seated directly in front of the president in the limousine, and Warren Partain Jr. would be part of the Naval Academy contingent that marched in his funeral procession in Washington. Following graduation from the academy in 1966, Partain went all over the world as a Marine officer. “His roots were in the Marine Corps; the Marine Corps is family to him,” Mike Partain later said of his father.

  Mike Partain’s mother was a French Canadian, Lisette Pampalon, whom his father had met while on a training cruise aboard the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La, which made a stop in Quebec City in the summer of 1964. Warren and Lisette were married in June 1966, right after Warren’s graduation, and a year later the couple moved to Camp Lejeune, where Warren was assigned as a communications instructor. It was there they conceived their first child while living in the housing at Tarawa Terrace. Mike Partain was born on January 30, 1968, a seemingly healthy baby except for one inexplicable detail: he had a red skin rash all over his body.

  Partain’s mother hated Camp Lejeune. It was too far removed from the forested vistas of Canada, her son said. “Lejeune is a swamp,” he said. “The butt-crack of the South.” His mother didn’t like the taste or smell of the water there, either, “but my Dad said, ‘Just boil it,’” Partain recalled.

  When it came time for her husband to ship off for Vietnam in the spring of 1968, Lisette told Warren that if he left her at Lejeune, she and the baby wouldn’t be there when he returned. So before he went to war in May, Warren Partain moved his family to California, where his parents had a home near Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the 1st Marine Division.

  Warren returned unscathed from Vietnam in July 1969 after serving in a relay battalion for division communications between Da Nang and Okinawa, Japan, the island launching pad for US troops and aircraft during the war. He took an assignment at the Pentagon, and in 1970 he and his wife had their second child, a daughter who was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, DC. Warren Partain retired from the Corps that year, landed a job with Johnson & Johnson in Michigan, and then moved in 1972 to Florida, where he settled with his family in nearby Winter Haven when Mike Partain was four years old.

  Besides the strange skin rash at birth, Mike Partain had a number of other health issues growing up. Some seemed routine, such as frequent infections of the nose, ears, and throat, but others were highly unusual. “My toenails were described as rotten,” Partain said. At age thirteen—and four more times over the next five years—he experienced painful swellings in the testicles, a problem most often experienced by sexually active older men. “The doctor asked if I had sex and I asked him what that was,” Partain recalled. There were other problems, usually ones that were never understood by his doctors, throughout his teens and twenties. “I just remember being sick all the time,” he said.

  Partain followed a path not atypical for young men in Florida in the 1980s—he worked at Disney World, went to Florida State University and dated a girl there, then, when she broke up with him, let his grade point average slip to 1.9. His father told him he was on his own, so Partain joined the Navy in January 1988. He was assigned to the nuclear program and was sent to the Naval Training Center in Orlando.

  Not long after he arrived, the rash Partain was told he had as a baby returned with a vengeance. “It exploded all over my body,” he said. “The only way I could get [the itching] to stop was to jump in the shower and stand in scalding hot water. The Navy sent me to the hospital and accused me of drinking. But it wouldn’t go away.” Partain was diagnosed with atopic dermatitis, which disqualified him from being in the nuclear program. “They discharged me as an erroneous enlistment because I had the rash when I was born,” he said.

  Partain recalled that the rash had turned up only periodically in his younger years, and he realized it often recurred whenever he wore suits that had been dry-cleaned. He also discovered years later that there was a plume of groundwater at the Orlando training base contaminated by the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, with PCE concentrations as high as 28,000 parts per billion. “I think that’s why it came back,” he said of the skin rash that cost him a Navy career.

  He came back home in March 1998 and went to work again at Disney World, and married a young woman from Indiana named Margaret in the spring of 1989. They had their first child later that year, and Partain returned to Florida State to earn a history degree in 1992. The couple had a second child, and Partain worked for about five years in sales and as a store manager, then, in 1997, he started teaching high-school history. Kids three and four arrived during his tenure as a teacher, before Partain started a full-time career as an insurance adjuster in 2001. He was promoted to State Farm’s office in Tallahassee in 2007.

  It was there that Partain’s life took an unwelcome turn. “I started feeling tired more than usual,” he said. “I felt drained a lot. Then I went turkey hunting one day, and that night Margaret and I hugged, and her hand hit a bump on my chest. I’m a hairy guy and it felt like a cyst you get with an ingrown hair, but she didn’t like it. It was at 2 o’clock above the nipple.”

  When the bump didn’t go away after two weeks, Partain’s wife insisted he have it checked out. The doctor who examined Partain, he said, “gave me that look that said, ‘I don’t really like this,’ and asked me to get a mammogram.”

  Partain is a tall and burly man who wears a dark goatee—not the kind of patient one would expect to see visiting a treatment center for breast cancer. “You feel stupid, a guy going for a mammogram,” he said. “They thought I was waiting for my wife. When I went in they brought me a pink smock with flowers on it. It took a long time after they did it for them to call me. Then the nurse came in and had that look on her face. Something was really wrong. She said they needed more pictures, a sonogram. You couldn’t sledge-hammer a pin up my ass. There was a big white mass, with dots all over it—calcification, a calling card of cancer.”

  A biopsy was ordered and Partain went home to await the results, feeling “like death warmed over,” he said. The diagnosis of breast cancer came on t
he date of his eighteenth wedding anniversary, April 25, 2007. Partain was thirty-nine years old. For some reason it occurred to him that he had just gotten a new ringtone for his cell phone that suddenly seemed prophetic. It was a song by REM entitled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

  The mastectomy was done on May 4, 2007; the surgeon removed a 2.5-centimeter tumor and a big chunk of tissue from the left side of Partain’s chest. As he lay in the recovery room—and for weeks afterward—Partain could not come to grips with what had happened to him. Statistics he found online showed that men accounted for just one out of a hundred diagnosed cases of breast cancer, and there was no history of the disease in his family, even among the women. He even had himself tested later for a genetic mutation that is found in most of the men who do get breast cancer, and the results came back negative.

  Less than two months after the surgery, the most plausible explanation for Partain’s rare diagnosis was revealed to him, thanks to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing held in Washington on Camp Lejeune’s water contamination. Partain was walking back to his car after a follow-up visit with his doctor in mid-June when he got a call from his father. “I was not used to hearing emotion in his voice, him being a former Marine officer and all that, but when he called he asked me where I was,” Partain said. “I immediately thought something was wrong with Mom. He said you need to get your ass home and turn on your TV—that was more like him—and when I got home about twenty minutes later I turned on CNN and there was the lead-in to Jerry Ensminger testifying at Congressman Stupak’s hearing.”

  One statement in the CNN report struck Partain like a thunderbolt—that federal investigators were looking for health problems in babies born at Camp Lejeune between January 1968 and December 1985. “January 1968—that was the month I was born,” Partain said. “I knew immediately what had happened.” He dug out photos of his mother holding him in her room just after he was born at the Camp Lejeune hospital; on the bedside table was a glass of water sitting next to a baby bottle.

  Sifting through information about the base contamination, Partain realized that he and his mother had been hit with a double dose of toxic chemicals on an almost daily basis. His family had lived at Tarawa Terrace, where the water was tainted by the dry-cleaning solvent PCE, and his mother—who didn’t drive—spent much of her time on the base in areas served by the highly contaminated Hadnot Point system: the hospital, the Officers’ Club, the PX. “Everything my mother needed was on the base, so she never left it,” he said.

  Partain contacted Ensminger through Stupak’s office, and the two talked on the morning Partain was scheduled to begin chemotherapy. It was one of the scariest days of his life. “I never drank, except in college, never smoked pot or used drugs. I never put anything in my body that could be harmful,” Partain said, “and here I had to have these injections of drugs.” But Ensminger gave him something positive to think about before he was put down for the chemo. “He was shocked and said he didn’t know what to say,” Partain said, “but that I needed to worry about getting better and then we’d talk more. And he told me about the website”—“The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten.”

  For the next six months Partain and Ensminger burned through thousands of minutes on their cell phones, going over every detail that had been uncovered so far about the Lejeune contamination and the Navy’s handling of it. Partain also contacted a reporter at the Lakeland Ledger in Florida, which ran a story about him in September 2007 under the headline, “Florida Man Has Breast Cancer.” The article ran online, and a few days later Partain got a call from a man in Birmingham, Alabama, Kris Thomas, who said he had lived in Tarawa Terrace as a boy at the same time as Partain, in 1968, and had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. “This was incredible,” Partain said. “The whole fact that I had male breast cancer and how rare it is—especially since we had no history of it in our family, people said it had to be a fluke—but this helped confirm for me that it had to be connected to Camp Lejeune.”

  Partain finished chemotherapy in November 2007 and was declared cancer-free, but it was a victory that took a heavy physical toll on him. Ensminger had asked him to join the Community Assistance Panel that was providing input on the federal health studies of Lejeune being conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and Partain agreed to go to the next CAP meeting in Atlanta on December 6, 2007. “I had just finished chemo, my hair was gone, and I looked terrible,” Partain said. He arrived at the meeting late, and though the two had not yet met in person, Ensminger knew it was Partain as soon as he walked into the room. “Jerry didn’t say it but his face said, ‘You look like hell.’ . . . And he told me later that the Marine Corps people looked like they’d seen a ghost.”

  From that point on, Partain became fully immersed in the saga of the tainted water at Camp Lejeune. Borrowing from his years as a history teacher, when he would write a couple of dozen facts on the chalkboard and have his students use them to put together a broad narrative, Partain gave himself the same kind of assignment to tell the full story of the base contamination. It would be a task that would consume virtually all of his free time for the next seven months. “I laughed because it was like the kids getting their revenge,” he said.

  Ensminger, he said, had an “encyclopedic knowledge of Camp Lejeune,” which actually gave him an advantage over the Marine Corps, because every time someone left a key post involving the Lejeune contamination, a new person would have to come in and learn everything from scratch. “But in order to be effective I realized that you have to communicate that knowledge to people, like members of Congress,” Partain said. He asked Ensminger if the victims of the pollution had a timeline of events that had occurred, similar to the highly selective list that had been put together by the Marine Corps. “He said, ‘No we don’t and you need to write it,’” Partain said.

  “So I spent from December 2007 to July 2008 working on it all the time,” he said. “I still had to work every day and had to do all the stuff I usually did for the kids, then I worked on it in the evenings.” All the effort paid off with a detailed chronology documenting the pollution problems and actions by the Marines, federal and state regulators, and others involved with the waste problems from the time Camp Lejeune opened in 1941 to the day it was declared a Superfund site in 1989. The timeline was posted on “The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten” website in time for the CAP meeting in July 2008. “And we got immediate validation it was effective,” Partain said.

  During the meeting, a Defense Department lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Tencate, made a statement that the Marines had notified people immediately in 1985 when the water contamination was discovered. Partain raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute, this article published in the base newspaper in 1985 says that ‘people were not directly exposed.’” During the next break in the meeting, Tencate and a Marine Corps spokesman, Scott Williams, approached Partain and asked him where he got the information. “I told the colonel it was on our website and, unlike yours, it’s all annotated,” Partain said. “He went away in a huff and Williams said, ‘You won’t find any smoking guns.’ These two clowns doing that made me realize it really bothered them. The timeline really pulled together Jerry’s knowledge and all the documents. I felt like, how could they dismiss us now?”

  Some of the Marine Corps officials had actually publicly ridiculed Ensminger and his colleagues, knowing there were fewer than a hundred members of their loose-knit organization, “The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten,” Partain said. “The Marines were making fun of us, telling us we should notify all our members,” he said. But after the timeline went up and word spread about it, membership soared to more than 5,000. “The website became the rallying point,” Partain said. “And that was how we started finding the men with breast cancer.”

  Among the men who contacted Partain to say he wasn’t the only man from Lejeune with a type of cancer tha
t overwhelmingly affects women was Peter Devereaux. A former Marine who was stationed at the base from December 1980 to April 1982, serving in the 8th Communications Battalion, Devereaux lived in the French Creek area of the base, which got its water from the contaminated Hadnot Point system.

  Devereaux said in an interview that as a young Marine, he never suspected there were any problems with the water at the base. “You were nineteen or twenty years old and that was the last thing on your mind,” he said. Working and training in the North Carolina heat and humidity, though, he and the other young Marines “would drink a quart at a time,” he said.

  One of the main reasons Devereaux joined the Marines was that he hoped it might serve as a path to his real dream: becoming a boxer on the US Olympic team. He was a self-described “psychotic” about physical fitness—running marathons, boxing regularly, constantly working out—and he absolutely loved it. “The Marines were right up my alley,” he said. “So much teamwork; I loved serving my country. Even through all this stuff it was my best job.”

  After Devereaux left the Marines he returned to his home outside of Boston and started work as a machinist, earning extra money on weekends by doing landscaping and taking on small construction projects. Life was beautiful for more than twenty-five years, with a happy marriage and the birth of a healthy daughter, until the morning of January 11, 2008. “I got up early for my ten-year-old child,” he said. “I was forty-five then. I felt like I was getting a little fat, and I came across this lump on my breast and thought it was just fatty tissue. My wife and I talked and we scheduled an appointment—we took immediate action, which is not common for a man. Within a week the doctor called and said I had breast cancer. I couldn’t believe it. I’m a guy. I was like invincible. I was training for a marathon. To have any kind of cancer, that’s tough, but for a guy to have a woman’s cancer, my wife and I were reeling. We had no idea how it happened.”