A Trust Betrayed (17 page)

Around the same time that Gros was battling leukemia in Texas,
three daughters of Joan and Eddie Lewis, who had lived at Camp Lejeune as babies or toddlers in the late 1960s, were having serious and unusual health problems, too. Now adults in North Carolina, the sisters had spent the years from 1966 to 1970 in three different homes in the Tarawa Terrace area while Eddie was doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Those years were marked by frequent visits to the clinic for respiratory issues among the girls, but nothing as serious as what they would experience several decades later. One would have a baseball-sized uterine tumor discovered as she was delivering a baby girl; another underwent emergency surgery to remove more than a dozen noncancerous tumors from her uterus; and another would have half her lung removed because of a rare illness. And their younger brother, who had been born with two vertebrae fused together a year after his mother left Camp Lejeune, had been living for years with chronic back pain and headaches. In 2000—three years after the
ATSDR
report was completed—Joan Lewis read a newspaper article about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune extending over several decades, including the years her family lived there. She went online and requested information from the
ATSDR
, only to find when the packet arrived that every one of her children had experienced one or two of the symptoms listed as possible effects from the contaminants. Now convinced there was a connection between the water at Camp Lejeune and her family's array of health problems, Joan Lewis filed a claim for compensation with the Marine Corps in 2001. In 2013, she was still waiting for a response.
²

The year 2000 brought similar revelations to others. Louella Holliday, whose baby conceived at Camp Lejeune died just hours after his birth in 1973, saw a news report about the base's water problems. “I was watching TV getting ready to go to work and heard about Camp Lejeune and contaminated water,” Holliday
said. “I didn't catch the whole report, so I went to work and looked it up on the Internet. All the sites directed me to
ATSDR
. I had no idea what that was. . . . A lot of information came in the mail. That's when I finally realized, it wasn't me.” Not only did she and her husband lose a child after living at Camp Lejeune, but Louella lost the good health she had enjoyed as a girl and young woman. “I've been through a whole plethora of ailments,” she said. “It's easier to say what I haven't had.” The more she learned about the poisoned water—and the fact that the Marines had failed to inform her about it—the angrier Holliday became. “I could not imagine that Marine Corps officials had knowledge of this contamination for so many years without divulging it to the masses that had been adversely affected by it,” she wrote on a website for victims of the base pollution.
³

A report in 2000 on CNN about the contamination led Terry Dyer and her sister, Karen Strand, to ask for information from the
ATSDR
. They instantly saw a possible link with the sudden death of their father, John Fristoe, in 1973 at the age of forty-five, after he had worked for fifteen years as principal of an elementary school at Camp Lejeune. They also realized that their own spate of health issues, including bladder cancer, a miscarriage, hysterectomies, and cysts, and the severe mental and physical disabilities of their younger sister, Johnsie, might be linked to their childhoods at the base. “It all came together for me,” Dyer told a reporter for
The Veteran
in 2004. “I was on the phone to
ATSDR
the very next day. That was when I understood that the Marine Corps had not been honest with us. And that we deserved answers.”

Dyer and Strand concluded that the Marine Corps had robbed their father of his prime years. “He missed his children growing up,” Dyer said to the reporter. “He missed our marriages; he missed his grandchildren. And I'm convinced the water deprived my [younger] sister of any kind of normal life. So what should we
do? Nothing? Let it pass? What would you do if this was about you or your wife or sister or your children?”
⁴

Around the time that the Gros, Lewis, Holliday, and Dyer/Strand families were learning about the possible causes for their tragic illnesses, two hit movies appeared about heroes fighting corporate polluters,
A Civil Action
in 1998 and
Erin Brockovich
in 2000. Dyer contacted the model for the heroine of the latter movie, a California woman who teamed up with lawyer Edward Masry to win a $333 million settlement for victims of water poisoned by Pacific Gas & Electric. Masry's law firm wouldn't touch Dyer's case because it involved taking on the US military, Dyer said. She also called attorney Jan Schlictmann, the lawyer, played in the movie by John Travolta, who nearly went bankrupt suing W. R. Grace Corporation for contaminating the water in Woburn, Massachusetts, with trichloroethylene. Schlictmann didn't want to enter another lengthy legal battle over toxic pollution, but he offered some advice to Dyer over the phone: go to the media with your story, organize for political action, and start a website to spread the word. “He asked me if I was ready for a roller-coaster ride,” Dyer said. “He said it's gonna tear your heart out; it will be very hard.”

Inspired by the celebrated attorney's advice, the sisters went to work. Dyer set up meetings in Washington with members of Congress, including North Carolina's senators in the early 2000s—John Edwards, Jesse Helms, and Elizabeth Dole. The ultraconservative defense hawk Helms wouldn't meet with Dyer and her colleagues, but Dole, who succeeded Helms after his retirement, met with a group of Lejeune victims for more than an hour and at one point had tears in her eyes listening to their stories, Dyer said. Back home in Wilmington, North Carolina, Dyer and Strand organized a
group they called The Stand, an acronym for Toxic Homefront Empowered Survivors Take All Necessary Defense. And in the fall of 2002, they set up a website named
Watersurvivors.com
to allow people who lived at Camp Lejeune to connect and share their stories. Dyer also had another goal in mind: “I started the website so I could help people get health care and compensation,” she said.

Within a few months, more than 150 former base residents had landed on the site and posted tales of woe about problems that might have been caused by tainted water: cysts, tumors, ulcers, headaches, rashes, polyps, sore joints, birth defects, anemia, and diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and cancer. The numbers grew exponentially as word about Camp Lejeune's water spread through the media. Dyer and some of her newfound colleagues added documents about the environmental problems at the Marine Corps base to the website and posted forms that victims could use to file claims against the government.

Among the many victims who were drawn to the site after hearing about the
ATSDR
study was Sandra Carbone, who had lived at Camp Lejeune with her parents, four sisters, and brother from 1968 to 1971. The granddaughters of a Cherokee scout for the Army and the daughters of a Navy veteran, Carbone and a younger sister, Anita Roach, had both joined the Army to help pay for college. (Carbone said in an interview that she had passed the test for admission to the United States Naval Academy in 1974, the first year it was opened to women, but a sexist recruiter who didn't agree with the policy submitted her application late and she was disqualified.) Carbone served as a linguist with the Army Security Agency (
ASA
), as a clerk in the agency's communications division, and later as a specialist in electronics. Roach joined
ROTC
between her junior and senior years at Northwest Missouri State
University, but she suffered a severe spinal injury during officer training that required surgery. She had to drop out of college a semester before graduation.
⁵

All that they gave for the military was nothing compared to what Carbone and Roach believe the Marine Corps took from them and other members of their family. Carbone summed it up in a posting on a website for Lejeune victims in which she listed a long series of serious health problems plaguing her, her mother, and her three sisters. In 2001, the
ATSDR
sent Carbone's mother a questionnaire asking about her health and that of her son, who had been born at Lejeune. When Carbone read the explanation for the survey, describing contaminated water at the base during the time her family lived there, “I just flipped,” she said. “I think all of our health issues are related because we were all healthy before we moved to Camp Lejeune.” Later studies by the
ATSDR
and other scientific agencies listed fifteen specific diseases that could be linked to the contaminants in Lejeune's drinking water. But given how frightening the initial information was about the contamination, there was a tendency for people to blame all kinds of health problems on their exposure.

“We've had crazy stuff in our family,” Anita Roach said. “We never had any of these things in our family before we lived at Camp Lejeune. . . . My brother was born with lead poisoning. How else do you explain that? When we were growing up there it was instant milk, Tang and Kool-Aid, all with water right from the tap.”

Carbone went online to search for information and came upon
Watersurvivors.com
, Dyer's website. She e-mailed Dyer to tell her about her family's health issues. “She replied that it was her, Terry Fristoe, which was her name in high school,” Carbone said. “We had been best friends at Camp Lejeune.” Reconnected, the two talked about their time at the base and all the problems they had
while living there and in the years after they left. Dyer was angry about what had happened, but Carbone said she tried to turn something horrible into something positive. “Instead of getting super angry and mad, we can show the world what water contamination can do to you,” she said.

Jeff Byron also linked up with Dyer and her group after he learned about the contamination in May 2000. Byron and his wife, Mary, had been preparing for a trip from Ohio to North Carolina to show his daughters, Andrea and Rachel, where they were born while he was stationed at Camp Lejeune. The Byrons had no idea what had caused their daughters' extensive health problems until they received a letter on May 27, 2000, from the National Opinion Research Center, on behalf of the US Department of Health and Human Services, asking them to participate in a health survey because they lived at Tarawa Terrace during a period when the water was contaminated. Once the Byrons got past the initial shock of learning the Marine Corps had apparently poisoned their two daughters, they had another major concern. The survey asked only for information about Rachel, who had been conceived and born while the family lived on the base; it did not ask about Andrea, who was born two months before they moved into base housing. Byron contacted the
ATSDR
to inform the agency that after moving into Tarawa Terrace, Andrea had two of the maladies listed as possibly being connected to the water contamination, cleft palate and spina bifida. He was later informed that at least one of those qualified as a birth defect of concern, so Andrea would be included in the survey as well. But what really gnawed at Byron was the fact that he was only hearing about the tainted water more than fifteen years after his family was exposed to it. “It was clear to me after reading the questions in the survey that the Marines had been aware of this situation for a long time,” he said.
⁶

Jeff Byron was angry, but not at the institution he loved, just its
leaders. “I signed up to take a bullet for my country. My daughters didn't,” he said. “I still love the Marine Corps. They did a lot of good things for me. We had good memories, and a lot of friendships.” But now, Byron said, “I want them to be faithful to me.” The Byrons filed damage claims against the Defense Department—$3.5 million for Andrea and $4 million for Rachel. “I don't care about the money,” he said. “We want our children taken care of medically.”