A Trust Betrayed (36 page)

In January 2013, the
ATSDR
released another water-modeling report that said the contamination at Lejeune had begun as far back as August 1953, four years earlier than previously believed. A follow-up report two months later pushed the start date for the drinking-water contamination back even further, to around 1948, with the peak levels recorded in the years just before the tainted wells were shut down in 1985. “This reinforces what I always viewed as being the major point here, and that is the levels that existed in the drinking water were astoundingly high, and I'd be very concerned for the health of people who were exposed,” said Gerald LeBlanc, the head of environmental toxicology studies at North Carolina State University. Added Jerry Ensminger: “This is vindication
and verification of what I've been saying for nearly 16 years. I've had to be aggressive to make sure this happened. A lot of people have called me bullheaded and some other choice words. I'm under no illusion that had I not taken such a strong stance on this in the 1990s that we would not be anywhere close to where we are now.”
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In the spring of 2013, the Associated Press moved a three-part series on the Lejeune contamination that started with a story about the cleanup efforts at the base, nearly thirty years after the tainted wells had been shut down. “We probably have the most aggressive sampling regime for our drinking water than anybody else in the nation,” Bob Lowder, head of environmental quality for the base, said during a tour with an AP reporter. “Maybe in the world.” Lowder said the final remedy for toxic pollution at Lejeune would be in place by 2014. “So, for the most part, we're on the down-swing,” he said.
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The final story in the series focused on the tragic legacy of the contamination even as it was being cleaned up. AP reporter Allen Breed talked with Ron Poirier, who had been a Marine technician at Camp Lejeune in the mid-1970s. Poirier told Breed that he had dumped hundreds of gallons of toxic solvents onto the ground while working as an electronics technician at the base. He described how he and his fellow Marines had poured
TCE
that had been used to clean components into the woods by the Hadnot Point Industrial Area, where water wells were later found to be contaminated with the toxic solvent and other hazardous compounds.
²⁶

“Over the two years, how much did I dispose of?” Poirier asked. “Christ. We used to go through 55 gallons in less than a month. So, you know, if I had to say a rough guess would be 100 gallons a month. . . . It was probably more. That's a conservative figure.”
²⁷

At the time of the conversation in March 2013, Poirier was
battling esophageal cancer—one of the diseases that had been clearly linked to
TCE
. He died two months later at the age of fifty-eight. But while he was battling the cancer, Poirier had seen a report on NBC featuring Mike Partain and other former Lejeune residents who had been diagnosed with male breast cancer. The report aired in February 2013, and Poirier went online afterward and posted a rough apology.

“It is very difficult living with the tought that i took part in this ground polution and facing death from this cancer,” he wrote without going back to correct his typos. “I joined the USMC to serve and protect, not to harm.”
²⁸

In the interview with the AP reporter, Allen Breed, Poirier elaborated on his feelings. “I'm a religious person,” he said. “I believe in the universe. I don't think it's a direct thing. But I have guilt, let's put it that way. I have guilt.” Breed wrote that while Poirier knew he couldn't change the past, he had a final wish. “When judgment day comes, you know, I hope those people that suffered . . . realize that I didn't know what I was doing.”
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16

CHANGING THE CULTURE

They think . . . because what they're doing is important they can do any damn thing they want.

—
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN D
.
DINGELL
(
D
-
MI
)

N
o doubt the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, had plenty on his plate in the spring of 2013. Congress had made deep cuts in the Pentagon's budget, President Obama had a firm plan for disengaging from the war in Afghanistan, new threats to national security were emerging from continued political turmoil in the Middle East, and, closer to home, reports of sexual assault and abuse by members of the military continued popping up in the headlines, putting all the service commanders on the defensive about their enforcement of codes of conduct. Still, it seemed at least remotely plausible that Amos, who was expected to step down soon as commandant after more than forty years in the Navy and Marines, might be able to spare twenty or thirty minutes to discuss the decades-old saga of environmental
health issues at Camp Lejeune, which seemed finally to be moving into its closing chapters. Wrong. “I'm afraid the Commandant's schedule is booked up for the foreseeable future. Sorry about that,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Hayes in an e-mail on June 10, 2013, responding to a long-standing request for an interview with Amos about Camp Lejeune.
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Then again, the response from Hayes, the press secretary for the commandant, wasn't surprising. Whenever there has been any significant development in the investigations and studies of Camp Lejeune's toxic water, the Marine Corps inevitably has declined to comment—even when the
Washington Post
asked for a response to the report by the commandant's own panel essentially exonerating the Navy and Marines of any wrongdoing in addressing the pollution problems when they were first discovered. Occasionally, on specific issues, the Marines would issue a statement, but usually only in response to written questions. It was clear, too, that every official comment to the media had been carefully crafted and fully vetted by top brass, especially the Navy lawyers.

The military's discussions of Camp Lejeune on Capitol Hill were much the same—mostly characterized as a one-way street. Brooks Tucker, senior policy adviser for national security and veterans' affairs to the senior senator from North Carolina, Richard Burr, has been present at more than a dozen meetings between his boss and Marine Corps officials. Tucker, a former Marine officer, described one meeting on the Lejeune contamination that was opened by one of the Marine Corps attorneys—later identified as Robert Hogue, counsel to the commandant—with a firm pronouncement: “This is not a negotiation.”

“They've been lawyered up for decades,” Tucker said. “It's very hard once you have layers and layers of obfuscation—and more so for an institution that has integrity as its core—to come out and say we've been lying for forty years.” During the decades that hazardous
wastes were building up in some of the base water supplies, it was evident that environmental officials either at Camp Lejeune or in the Navy Facilities Engineering Command at Norfolk, Virginia, were not paying much attention to the problems, Tucker said. “I don't think anyone really wanted to acknowledge the elephant that was getting bigger,” he said. “There was some turning a blind eye. The talking points were that they were very much concerned about the health issues, but they needed to wait for the science on this.”

At the same time, Tucker said, “there was a fair amount of bullying going on,” mainly directed at the federal scientists assigned to investigate the effects of Lejeune's pollution. And among those researchers at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “there was a systemic governmental desire to not want to be confrontational with another government branch,” he said. “Plus they're relying on the agency that caused the pollution to fund the studies.”

Of course, concerns about potential liabilities, conservatively estimated to be at least several billion dollars, had a lot to do with the military's hard-line stance. Tucker said that at one meeting with Burr and others on Capitol Hill, the Marine Corps commandant asked rhetorically, “Do we want to open the treasury?” Lawyers at the Justice Department and the Defense Department were all on the same page with their legal strategy, Tucker said: “Delay, delay, delay.” But as a former Marine, Tucker said he was disappointed by the institution's deep-rooted refusal to respond to the concerns of those who felt they had been harmed by Lejeune's pollution. “At some point at the mid-level, some of them could have pushed back on the way things were being done,” he said. “I would hesitate to even call them Marines.”

Brad Miller, the former Democratic congressman from North Carolina who had led investigations of the Lejeune pollution, also expressed dismay at the military's posture. “I was disappointed in the Marines and the Navy,” Miller said:

There's a natural human tendency to try to minimize the harm your agency has done even if it was done before you were there. But they were not pursuing this with the eagerness and enthusiasm they should have. It was not so much covering up. But the liabilities seem so small in comparison to the loyalty they should have felt for their own people. They didn't come to Congress and say we have a problem and we need to compensate people. The push had to come from people like Jerry [Ensminger] and then Congress, and it was against the resistance of the Marine Corps and the Navy.

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.
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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.
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