by Mike Magner
The Capitol Hill veteran, Democratic congressman John Dingell of Michigan, wasn’t just disappointed in the military’s response to its pollution problems—he was downright angry. “Those people down there [at Lejeune] are entitled to be safe when they serve their country and are entitled to have their family safe,” Dingell said. “Lejeune isn’t the only place. There’s hardly a military base in this country that isn’t effectively a Superfund site. Frankly we tore ’em up on it. And they were recalcitrant as hell and still are. We’re gonna make them stop. There just has to be enough pain there.”
Dingell added that he had been dealing with the military for decades on issues ranging from toxic waste to contract fraud. “They think . . . that because what they’re doing is important they can do any damn thing they want. And that’s not the case.”
Sherri Goodman, who was deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security during the Clinton administration, spent most of her eight years at the Pentagon in the 1990s pushing the military to address its contaminated sites. Goodman went on to become senior vice president and general counsel at CNA, a think tank in Alexandria, Virginia, that runs the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. She said one of the most difficult challenges she faced at the Pentagon was changing old environmental standards that were deeply ingrained in the military’s culture. “The practices of the twenties and forties and sixties were no longer appropriate,” she said. It took the Navy time to understand that. Plus, Goodman said, “the Marine Corps at the time was not as accustomed as other services to getting complaints from their own. So the Lejeune case probably put the Marine Corps a little on the defensive.”
Goodman pointed out that the military has now been moving in the right direction on environmental issues. It has even agreed to set aside land at some of its bases, including Camp Lejeune, to provide a buffer between its operations and nearby residents. “It helps build trust with communities,” she said.
Still, nearly nine hundred Superfund sites are abandoned military facilities or industrial sites where defense materials have been produced, according to a recent federal report on environmental hazards in America. The threats from military sites range from toxic chemicals in groundwater to radioactive wastes buried at former nuclear weapons plants.2
Some communities near the sites have been dealing with increased health problems, premature deaths, and deep anxieties for years and years. Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio was shut down in 2001, not long after it was labeled by the EPA as the “top priority” for cleanup in the state of Texas. To this day, neighborhoods surrounding the former base are dotted with purple crosses in front yards, signifying homes where someone has cancer. “We are dying day by day,” longtime community resident Robert Alvarado Sr. told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I have kidney failure, my wife has thyroid cancer, my neighbor just died of breast cancer.” Illnesses such as liver cancer, which has been confirmed by the Texas Health Department as occurring at twice the normal rate in several San Antonio neighborhoods, are the legacy of sixty years of solvents and wastes, such as TCE and battery acids, being dumped directly onto the ground. Kelly became the nation’s first Air Force base in 1940 and at its peak was performing half the maintenance work on Air Force planes and equipment. By the time it was closed, TCE levels as high as 49,000 parts per billion were found on the base, and levels of between 10 and 100 ppb in the groundwater beneath 22,000 nearby homes.3
In some communities near military toxic sites, residents have used tactics like those of the Lejeune victims to try to force the government to address their problems. “I created this website to document what happened to me at George Air Force Base, and my 39-year quest to find out what I was exposed to,” wrote a website manager in Jamestown, California, Frank Vera III:
I now know that I am not the only one to suffer adverse health effects because of an exposure to environmental contaminants at George AFB.
Over one hundred people have contacted me through GeorgeAFB. Info regarding health problems that these people, and their friends and family developed during and shortly after being stationed at George AFB. In some families, every child who was born at George AFB died before the age of twenty-four years, with some families experiencing the loss of up to four children. In other families, all but one of up to five family members, including adults, died at or shortly after leaving George AFB.4
The efforts by the Lejeune victims to demand justice seem to have had impacts nationwide. Lenny Siegel, head of the California-based Center for Public Environmental Oversight that has been monitoring cleanups at military and industrial sites since 1992, said he has seen a culture change among scientists addressing contamination issues like those at Camp Lejeune. “I know this from [National Academies of Sciences] panels I’m on—everybody’s aware of Camp Lejeune,” Siegel said. “There’s a feeling of let’s do this right. That means something has gotten across. . . . Maybe there’s a new sensitivity.”
Christopher Portier, who left as director of the ATSDR in the spring of 2013, acknowledged that he had been asked to move from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in 2010 to help turn things around at the agency, which was facing heavy criticism during the George W. Bush administration for bowing to pressures from the military and from the industries in its studies. “In my three years at ATSDR the culture has undoubtedly changed,” Portier said. “We’ve put in a large number of changes to force greater accountability, to speed up processes, and to ensure quality of the work that’s going on.”
Portier defended the agency’s research on Camp Lejeune and other contaminated sites. “The people who work at ATSDR, regardless of what you might hear about them from outside, these people are very dedicated and very hard-working in every situation they work in,” he said. “They really work very hard because it tears them up to see these communities going through struggles they’re going through from some of the exposures they’re looking at. So they’ve always tried to do their absolute best to address issues in every single community. I’ve worked with them day in, day out on hundreds of sites and I have never seen people so concerned and hard-working to get things out the door so communities can understand what’s going on.”
A new Public Health Assessment for Camp Lejeune, a new study of male breast cancer cases, and a study of the causes of death among Marines who were at the base while the water was contaminated were all expected to be completed by the end of 2013 or early in 2014, said Portier. In addition, the massive survey of health issues among hundreds of thousands of Marines stationed at both Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton would be done in 2014 or 2015.
None of the health studies ever would have advanced this far without the relentless pressure on the government from the victims of the contamination. “They are an amazing group of people,” Portier said. “Their efforts have been remarkable. For lay public, for people who are not scientists, to have developed an understanding of what’s going on to the degree that these folks have, to participate to the degree they have participated, and to challenge both ATSDR and the Marine Corps and the Navy to do their job appropriately the way they have is astonishing. I have never seen it before.”
Portier added that the agency might never have realized the potential concerns about male breast cancer cases connected to Lejeune had it not been for Mike Partain’s search for fellow victims. “The health study might have found the relationship,” Portier said. “But I think the push by them to do a formal study to look at this issue, it clearly came from them and we would not be doing that type of study without their efforts.”
“They’re incredibly effective advocates and forceful individuals,” agreed Richard Clapp, the veteran epidemiologist in Boston who worked with Jerry Ensminger and others on the ATSDR’s Community Assistance Panel for years. “Jerry in particular is like a force of nature,” Clapp said. “I have seen people like that in other communities. But this is an unusually effective group and the CAP is one of the most effective
I’ve ever seen.”
The Marine Corps—an institution revered in America for more than two centuries—may be indelibly stained by its response to the Lejeune contamination. “As more people learn the facts, the Marine Corps leadership will be left defending an untenable position,” said former senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina. “Denying what happened at Camp Lejeune is a blemish on the Corps’ unmatched reputation.”
“There are former and retired Marines today who will tell you of how, when they served at the installation, they used to run the tap for five or ten minutes in the morning before the smell of gasoline would dissipate so they could draw what they thought was safe water to make coffee. That tells you something,” she said. “It appears that no one in a position of leadership took any meaningful action.” Dole noted that the Navy had its own standards for safe drinking water in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ignored. “The extensive array of Marine Corps documents that Jerry Ensminger and his colleagues present on their website tells this story convincingly—and in the Corps’ own words and on their own letterhead,” she said, adding:
The water contamination problem evolved—and got worse—over time. It was a local issue in the mid-1960s. Years later, once the issue found its way to Washington, DC, and the Pentagon, it became a problem for the Corps. And as the scope and potential cost of the problem—that the water had been contaminated for decades and involved hundreds of thousands of Marines and their families—became known, it then had to compete for space in an always-inadequate Marine Corps budget, to say nothing of the profound embarrassment it would cause the Corps.
Most damaging of all to the Corps was the sense of betrayal felt by many victims who had been promised that they were part of a family and that whatever happened to them, “the Marines take care of their own.” The sense that the Marine Corps leadership had turned its back on their problems and, even worse, flat-out denied it was to blame was especially painful for men and women who had devoted big chunks of their lives to the service.
Sadly, the abandonment of service members has been a repeated theme in recent years throughout the US military. There was the 2005 Army cover-up of the fact that former National Football League star Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. There was the 2007 scandal of shabby treatment for wounded war veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. There were the myriad problems of mis-marked graves and lost remains at Arlington National Cemetery uncovered in 2010.
Nor was the Pentagon alone in its mistreatment of veterans and active-duty personnel. The Department of Veterans Affairs had a backlog of nearly 900,000 claims for disability benefits in 2012, according to the VA, and 19,500 of the veterans awaiting benefits died while their claims were pending, a study by the independent Center for Investigative Reporting found. The situation for Camp Lejeune victims was even worse. Senator Richard Burr was told by the VA in March 2013 that the law signed by President Obama the previous August, providing health coverage for veterans and family members made sick by the base pollution, would not be fully implemented until at least March 2014, and possibly not until 2015, because rules needed to be written for providing benefits to family members, or nonveterans. Burr threatened to try to freeze pay bonuses for VA leaders until the rules were in place.5
Among the Lejeune victims themselves in 2013, there was anger at leaders of the Marine Corps, frustration that studies of the contamination had gone on for so long, and occasionally a message of hopefulness amid so much pain and anguish.
“I’m not mad at the Marine Corps,” said Jeff Byron, who is convinced that both of his daughters were harmed by the pollution at Lejeune. “I’m mad at the leaders of the Department of Defense who have known this since 1980.” Byron expressed pride that his son joined the Marines even after what happened to his family. “We love the Corps,” he said. “But then you find out the leadership did what they did. I feel like Jonah. I’ve been swallowed up and they’ve spit us out. Tell the Marine Corps leaders, they’re damn lucky this wasn’t two hundred years earlier,” Byron said. “I wouldn’t be talking to lawyers; I’d be getting my six-shooter. They allowed tens of thousands of children to become sick and had no moral fortitude to do anything about it.”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” said Tom Gervasi, who was based at Lejeune in the 1950s and diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003. “I have no problem with the Marine Corps other than the politics—the generals, the colonels, and others who lied. I was proud to serve. If I was eighteen or twenty years old again I would have no problem serving.” Gervasi noted that he was granted full disability for his cancer in April 2013. “In the end I have won, to a degree,” he said. “But I don’t know how much time I have left. Each day is a struggle.” Gervasi’s days were truly numbered; he died on December 3, 2013, at age 77.
Mike Partain said in June 2013 that even though he had survived breast cancer to that point, the disease and the battle with the Marine Corps had taken a heavy toll. “By 2011 I felt like I was dying, was having panic attacks, from all the stress,” he said. “I told Margaret the stress was killing me and asked for a divorce.”
Tom Townsend, who believes that both his son and his wife died from exposure to the Lejeune contamination, also said he suffered bouts of depression, though for the most part his health was good for a man in his eighties. “I’d like to see the Marine Corps admit they covered up an environmental disaster and the Navy be required to compensate people, pay our claims,” Townsend said. “I don’t know why they did the cover-up. I guess maybe they were ashamed of what they did.”
For Jerry Ensminger, the fight was far from over in mid-2013. He was keeping the pressure on Congress to demand a better response from the VA and to amend the new law named after his daughter so that it would declare a “presumptive disability” for all veterans who had suffered from health problems after spending time at Camp Lejeune, making them eligible for disability benefits without having to beg for help.
Ensminger, too, has strong feelings for the rank and file in the service. “Our motto is Semper Fi and the slogan ‘We take care of our own’ is still very much alive at the operating levels of the Marine Corps,” he said. “But those very words only have meaning for the leadership of the Corps when they can benefit from it. They have done everything in their power not to do what was right.”
Peter Devereaux, despite living with a death sentence after his breast cancer spread through his bones in 2009, maintained a remarkably upbeat attitude considering all that had happened to him. In 2012, he told his hometown newspaper, the North Andover Citizen outside of Boston, that he was already a year past the life expectancy his doctor had given him three and a half years earlier, and was doing everything he could to try to stay alive. “When you’re first diagnosed, you feel like you’ve lost control,” Devereaux said. “The one thing you can control is your attitude toward fighting the disease. I try anything that might work.”6
On an early summer Saturday in 2013, Devereaux proudly proclaimed that he had just walked a mile and a half for the first time in years. “I constantly do treatment,” he said. “Physically my body has taken a beating. I’m fifty-one now, but some days I feel like eighty.”
There was still a flash of resentment and fury in Devereaux, though. “I would never recommend to anyone that they go into the Marine Corps, especially at Camp Lejeune, knowing how contaminated the bases are,” he said. “I’m beyond pissed. The Marines are like a mafia.”
He added, “I would like them to tell my daughter that her dad may not see her graduate.”
EPILOGUE
The history of the Marine Corps is rich with stories of heroism, going all the way back to the American Revolution when John Paul Jones led brash attacks on British warships off the coasts of Ireland and England. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Major Smedley Butler earned two Medals of Honor fighting in Mexico and Haiti. During World War I, First Sergeant Dan Daly led his troops into battle under heavy fire at Belleau
Wood in France, shouting “Come on, you sons-o’-bitches! Do you want to live forever?” In World War II, John Basilone, a machine gunner, was credited with taking out hundreds of Japanese at Guadalcanal before being killed by a mortar shell during the attack on Iwo Jima.
Such acts of valor would not be possible without total faith and trust in the military branches and their leaders. In the Marine Corps, especially, the institutional vows to leave no one behind and to care for each other as family remain the ideal, and loyalty seems to be undiminished among the rank and file today. Love for the service would have to be deep for so many to volunteer for three or four or more tours of duty, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After active duty ends, however, it is not clear how strong these bonds remain, even for those who had stellar and lengthy careers. Following World War II, returning troops were rewarded in part with a fully paid education under the GI Bill, and the health care and pensions that veterans receive seem to be the least the country can do for those who have served. But for many, much more is needed, and lately, in times of fiscal stress, the government has been failing to respond.
The most dramatic signs of disregard for struggling veterans came in 2007 when the Washington Post revealed shoddy and inadequate care for wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Years later, despite promises by the Obama administration to do better, out of a backlog of 900,000 pending claims, more than half a million filed with the Department of Veterans Affairs had seen no action for four months or more. In August 2013, a petition signed by 26,000 veterans was sent to President Obama asking him to fire VA Secretary Eric Shinseki for failing to eliminate the backlog.1