A Trust Betrayed (37 page)

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

T
he 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.