A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  Miller had had enough. He began organizing for a House Committee on Science and Technology hearing on Camp Lejeune that would once again put all the players on the same stage, as the Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing had done in 2007. The session was set for September 16, 2010, under the title “Camp Lejeune: Contamination and Compensation, Looking Back, Moving Forward.” And the star witness this time around was Mike Partain, the first to provide testimony. “‘You have male breast cancer’ were the words which greeted me and my wife on our 18th wedding anniversary,” he began. Partain told of his struggles with the disease nearly forty years after he was born at Lejeune in 1968. A retired Navy medical officer, James Watters, who had been stationed at Lejeune from 1977 to 1979, told of his Stage III kidney cancer. Former Marine Peter Devereaux told of the death sentence he was handed after his breast cancer spread through his bones. “I have a great wife and we have a 12-year-old daughter,” Devereaux said. “This disease has not only ravaged me, it has ravaged my entire family. It has impacted my daughter severely. She is not confident of her future with me and I am not confident of my future with her. I have no idea if I will see my daughter graduate high school, go to college or get married. Before my diagnosis I had been a very productive person. I feel like such a burden to everyone especially my wife and daughter. I am no longer able to work due to the devastating side effects and physical limitations from my treatments and surgeries.”48

  Then the panel heard from Major General Eugene G. Payne Jr., assistant deputy commandant at Marine Corps headquarters. “The Corps is and always has been a large family, and we all knew people who were stationed or worked at Camp Lejeune during their military careers,” Payne said. “My first tour of duty was at Camp Lejeune in 1970. Many of my friends and most of the senior leadership of the Corps, both officers and enlisted, were at Camp Lejeune during the period when this water was contaminated. We have a personal and professional interest in finding answers to questions about the health of our Marine families.”

  This heartfelt statement was followed by a more surprising one, when Payne was asked by Congressman Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia, if, “looking back over the past 30 years,” there was “any action or inaction” he “would have changed.” “Sir, there are a number of actions that I would have changed,” responded Payne:

  I would—I can’t tell you how many times over the last three years in working with this issue on behalf of the Marine Corps, I would have given anything to have rolled back the clock and to have known and to have been able to influence during that era what we know today to be the case. It is astounding some of the things that happened, and I think that they happened for a number of reasons. I think part of it was mentioned earlier. I think we were ignorant, quite frankly, of some of the implications. I think we were lulled into a sense of complacency or at least a lack of urgency by the fact that we were not out of compliance. And I am not trying to excuse what happened. I think that there were many, many errors made on behalf of the Marine Corps. But it is difficult to look back through the lens of 2010 at what we did or did not know, or should or should not have done in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, but there are many things that I would have done differently. There are things I would have done differently five and ten years ago. I have only been working this for about three years and it is—one normally shakes their head and wonders at some of the things that did or did not occur.

  The hearing closed with testimony from Christopher Portier, who had been installed earlier that year as director of the ATSDR. Portier also made some news, when asked by Broun about the 2009 report by the National Academies of Sciences saying that illnesses could not be definitively linked to water contamination at Lejeune, and that further research would not be any more conclusive. “We are going to go forward and evaluate this population because we believe it is scientifically credible,” Portier responded. “We believe it is the right public health move, and we believe it is what needs to be done. And so we will do it. And I think that is our answer to the report from the academy.”

  Portier added: “In terms of their finding that there is limited information relating TCE and PCE to disease, I simply need to look at the disease of cancer and point out to them that virtually every national authority or international authority that has looked at TCE and PCE has labeled it ‘reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen’ or a ‘probable human carcinogen.’ And so the linkage there is extremely strong. There is no doubt in my mind that these are toxins that you do not want in your water.”

  The following month, October 2010, there were two key announcements from the ATSDR that backed up Portier’s statements at the hearing. A 300-page report on the contamination of the Hadnot Point water system confirmed that more than a million gallons of fuel had probably leaked into the base groundwater in the decades before 1987, and that the Marine Corps had known about it years before it had shut down contaminated wells. “The fact that the Hadnot Point WTP [water treatment plant] was substantially contaminated with PCE and TCE was well known to USMCB Camp Lejeune by May 1982; however the Base did not initiate sampling of raw and finished water at the Hadnot Point WTP until early December 1984,” the report said.49

  Portier also put his views about the National Research Council report on paper in a letter to top Navy and Marine Corps officials. “The review of cancer risks by the NRC was incomplete and only partially addressed concerns at Camp Lejeune,” Portier wrote. “Let me be perfectly clear; there was undoubtedly a hazard associated with drinking the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. The epidemiological studies and the associated exposure modeling will hopefully help us to decide on the level of risk associated with this hazard.”

  North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan told the Jacksonville Daily News that she had discussed the National Academies report with Portier at a meeting earlier in October 2010 and was pleased to see that his agency was now going on record discrediting it. “The 2009 National Research Council . . . report on Camp Lejeune had significant shortcomings, and failed to identify all contaminants present in Camp Lejeune’s drinking water such as benzene and vinyl chloride,” Hagan said in a statement to the newspaper. “The report also failed to provide an accurate picture of the adverse health effects associated with exposure. The report has become a major stumbling block for veterans attempting to receive VA benefits associated with their exposures at Camp Lejeune. This faulty report should not be used to determine benefits for our veterans.”50

  In fact, the Marine Corps had put the report to exactly that use. Earlier in 2010, it had issued a brochure citing the NRC report as evidence that the water contamination at Lejeune did not cause illnesses, and the Veterans Affairs Department was using the brochure and the report to deny disability claims for diseases said to be caused by the base water. Portier told Jerry Ensminger that he would send a letter discrediting the NRC report to the VA. Ensminger asked the Navy to do the same thing for all former residents of Camp Lejeune.

  “It’s only fair to ask, now that the federal agency that was created and mandated by Congress to investigate human health exposures at superfund sites has pointed out errors in the NRC report, that the Marine Corps would send a copy of this letter out to registrants,” Ensminger said, referring to the tens of thousands of people who had signed up for information updates on the Marine Corps website. The Marine Corps never responded to the request, however, and information about the flawed NRC report was never distributed to those most concerned about the contamination.51

  14

  VICTIMS UNITE

  At what point will there be an end to the reports, and meetings, and all the washing of the facts?

  —JODY MACPHERSON, WIFE OF MARINE COLIN MACPHERSON (1957–2004)

  After wrestling with the Department of Veterans Affairs for two years, Bob Kahaly, in 2010, became one of the first former Marines to be awarded disability benefits because of exposure to the toxic water at Camp Lejeune. He had been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, an
d the VA had ruled that his cancer could be linked to the tainted water. “I had just had my fifty-fourth treatment,” he said. “I was in trouble. I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad. I was about to lose everything; I was on the verge of foreclosure.”1

  Kahaly was one of six young men from Jacksonville, Florida, who had joined the Marines together shortly after graduating from Terry Parker High School in 1977. Five of the six ended up at Camp Lejeune; one did not. Three of the five who went to Lejeune would die of rare diseases before any of them reached the age of fifty; the other two—Kahaly and Frank Oshman—suffered crippling illnesses. Kahaly, now living outside of Jacksonville in Ponte Vedra, Florida, was at Lejeune in 1979 and 1980, working mostly in the French Creek area served by the Hadnot Point water system. “We were sweating all the time,” he said in an interview in 2013, “and we didn’t have bottled water. I remember the water had a sweet odor but it tasted nasty. I was a mechanic, so I was also exposed to TCE.”2

  Kahaly’s lymphoma diagnosis came in 2001, when he was forty-two years old. Seven years later he received a letter from the Marine Corps notifying him about the base water contamination. “When I started doing my homework, basically everything was like puzzle pieces coming together—my buddies dying and all that,” he said. That’s when he began applying for full disability benefits in addition to the health care he was provided by the VA.3

  Convincing the VA that his illness was related to his service at Lejeune was no easy matter. The federal agency had been insisting for a decade that none of the scientific studies that had been done on the situation at the base proved a connection between the water and the health problems people had encountered, and the National Academies of Sciences report in 2009 further entrenched the VA’s position. But as criticism of the NAS report mounted, both from independent scientists and those at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a slow shift began to occur inside the VA. In September 2009, John Hartung, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, was awarded a 30 percent disability benefit after he presented a letter to a veterans’ compensation board saying that the large cysts on his back and his chronic fatigue were “more likely than not” caused by exposure to toxic chemicals. Hartung, a Marine at Lejeune for six months in 1977, was one of the first to persuade the VA that his ailments were likely linked to the base contamination.

  “Every case is different,” Jerry Ensminger said at the time of the award. “You’re not going to find a doctor who’s going to sign a letter for everybody for every type of ailment they have.” What was needed, he said, was a clear statement from the government—meaning Congress, if the military was not going to make the declaration—that veterans who had lived at Camp Lejeune during the time of the contamination would be entitled to full disability payments if they incurred specific illnesses known to be caused by the chemicals in the water. “What we’re trying to do with this legislation is to try to take these hoops and hurdles away from the people so they don’t have to deal with this stuff,” Ensminger said in 2009. “The only hurdle these people will have to clear is to prove they were at Camp Lejeune during the years of contamination.”4

  Until that happened, veterans seeking disability benefits for their exposure to toxins at Camp Lejeune faced a mountain of frustration from the VA. Six months after applying in 2008, in the same month he learned that his breast cancer had spread through his bones, Peter Devereaux was denied compensation. He and his wife set about preparing a new application for VA benefits, this time with a binder filled with information about his disease, his exposure to contaminants at Camp Lejeune, and a letter from his doctor establishing a clear link between the two. The whole process required about eighty hours of work, including sitting through a one-hour hearing with a decision review officer for the VA, all while Devereaux was going through time-consuming and debilitating treatments for his cancer. “Finally everything fell into place,” Devereaux said. The letter from the VA approving a full package of benefits arrived in June 2010, two and a half years after he had been diagnosed with breast cancer and more than a year after he had been told he might only have two to three years to live. The key, he said, was a so-called “nexus letter,” signed by a doctor, stating that his disability was “more likely than not” caused by something that happened to him during his military service.

  Tom Gervasi, a Florida retiree who had served at Lejeune in the 1950s, had to fight the same battle as Devereaux. Gervasi spent two years in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, spending much of his time in North Carolina working and training in the heat and drinking tainted water from a canteen. He left Lejeune in 1956 with a wife and a baby on the way and spent the next forty-five years in his hometown of Rochester, New York, working mainly as a police officer and later as an investigator for the district attorney’s office. Two years after moving to Florida in 2001, Gervasi was diagnosed with breast cancer. His doctor told Gervasi that he was only the second man he had treated for the disease in his career.

  A mastectomy was followed by chemotherapy in 2004 and 2005, and Gervasi felt like he was getting better. “My hair came back,” he said. “And in 2009 I had a CT scan and they said I was cancer-free.” His joy was short-lived. Two weeks later he was back at the hospital with a fever. The doctor came in after more tests were done and reported that Gervasi had bone cancer throughout his body. It wasn’t until 2011 that Gervasi learned about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune. A cousin told him she had read an article about environmental issues at the base, and Gervasi’s wife went online and found out about Mike Partain. “I ended up going to a meeting in Tampa later with him and Jerry Ensminger,” Gervasi said.

  Once he learned about the long history of water contamination at Lejeune, Gervasi was a man possessed, despite the weakness caused by the cancer spreading through his body. “I read an article in the paper about an Army guy with cancer trying to get VA help, so I called his wife and she referred me to a reporter, Donna Koehn, at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and she was fantastic,” Gervasi said in an interview in June 2013. “She spent three hours here and we made the front page and the whole page 8. This was back in October just before my birthday. Donna wrote other articles. Every time I got a denial letter I let her know. Jerry [Ensminger] and Mike [Partain] said contact your senators—so I called Rubio and Nelson,” he said, referring to the two senators from Florida, Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bill Nelson. “Rubio gave me to Terry Finger on his staff, and she called me two or three times a week. She worked very diligently on my case. It took thirteen months and finally . . . after three rejections, the director of the VA agreed to honor my claim, I think to shut me up.”5

  Gervasi said the process with Veterans Affairs can be grueling. “You need to make a lot of noise,” he said. “The VA is going to shut you down. You’re just a piss pot to them. They generate papers and paperwork and you submit and then they want it done again.”

  It was the same story over and over for former Marines seeking disability benefits for the harm they believed had been done to them by Lejeune’s drinking water. The process almost always involved rejections followed by time-consuming appeals for those who didn’t give up, and sometimes even required help from friends in high places in Washington. Tom McLaughlin of Hampden, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2007, more than four decades after the two-year stint that he and his wife, Sally, did at Lejeune. They had a child who had died shortly after she was born with part of her brain missing. After learning about the tainted water at the base, Sally McLaughlin immediately wondered if it was connected to her daughter’s death, and when her husband came down with kidney cancer, her suspicions became certainty. Tom had been a mechanic at Camp Lejeune and had been exposed to the toxic solvent trichloroethylene at work. He and his wife had also been exposed to both TCE and its sister cleaning solvent, PCE, in their drinking water at home. It took three full years, and help from the two senators from Massachusetts at the time, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, for the VA to approve Tom McLaughlin’s app
lication for disability benefits. The decision finally came through in June 2010. Six months before that, Sally McLaughlin had died from stomach cancer. “I give her most of the credit,” McLaughlin told the local newspaper after he got the news about his benefits. “She was the one who pushed it, who did most of the legwork. I just threw up my hands and said this will never happen. But she was very tenacious. She wouldn’t give up on this.”6

  By September 2010, a top official of the VA, Thomas Pamperin, told a congressional committee that about two hundred veterans had sought benefits for disabilities connected to Lejeune’s tainted water, but only about twenty had been approved. In most cases, Pamperin said, the requests were denied because the veterans did not establish a clear “medical nexus” between exposure to toxic chemicals and their diseases. A few months after the hearing, under pressure to be more responsive, the VA opened an office in Louisville, Kentucky, just to handle claims from veterans who had spent time at Camp Lejeune. More than a year later, in April 2012, the VA reported that more than 1,200 claims had been submitted to the office, but still only about a quarter of them had been approved.7