A Trust Betrayed (26 page)

A biopsy was ordered and Partain went home to await the results, feeling “like death warmed over,” he said. The diagnosis of breast cancer came on the date of his eighteenth wedding anniversary, April 25, 2007. Partain was thirty-nine years old. For some reason it occurred to him that he had just gotten a new ringtone for his cell phone that suddenly seemed prophetic. It was a song by REM entitled “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

The mastectomy was done on May 4, 2007; the surgeon removed a 2.5-centimeter tumor and a big chunk of tissue from the left side of Partain's chest. As he lay in the recovery room—and for weeks afterward—Partain could not come to grips with what had happened to him. Statistics he found online showed that men accounted for just one out of a hundred diagnosed cases of breast cancer, and there was no history of the disease in his family, even among the women. He even had himself tested later for a genetic mutation that is found in most of the men who do get breast cancer, and the results came back negative.

Less than two months after the surgery, the most plausible explanation for Partain's rare diagnosis was revealed to him, thanks to the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing held in Washington on Camp Lejeune's water contamination. Partain was walking back to his car after a follow-up visit with his doctor in mid-June when he got a call from his father. “I was not used to hearing emotion in his voice, him being a former Marine officer and all that, but when he called he asked me where I was,” Partain said. “I immediately thought something was wrong with Mom. He said you need to get your ass home and turn on your TV—that was more like him—and when I got home about twenty minutes later I turned on CNN and there was the lead-in to Jerry Ensminger testifying at Congressman Stupak's hearing.”

One statement in the CNN report struck Partain like a thunderbolt—that federal investigators were looking for health problems in babies born at Camp Lejeune between January 1968 and December 1985. “January 1968—that was the month I was born,” Partain said. “I knew immediately what had happened.” He dug out photos of his mother holding him in her room just after he was born at the Camp Lejeune hospital; on the bedside table was a glass of water sitting next to a baby bottle.

Sifting through information about the base contamination, Partain realized that he and his mother had been hit with a double dose of toxic chemicals on an almost daily basis. His family had lived at Tarawa Terrace, where the water was tainted by the dry-cleaning solvent
PCE
, and his mother—who didn't drive—spent much of her time on the base in areas served by the highly contaminated Hadnot Point system: the hospital, the Officers' Club, the PX. “Everything my mother needed was on the base, so she never left it,” he said.

Partain contacted Ensminger through Stupak's office, and the
two talked on the morning Partain was scheduled to begin chemotherapy. It was one of the scariest days of his life. “I never drank, except in college, never smoked pot or used drugs. I never put anything in my body that could be harmful,” Partain said, “and here I had to have these injections of drugs.” But Ensminger gave him something positive to think about before he was put down for the chemo. “He was shocked and said he didn't know what to say,” Partain said, “but that I needed to worry about getting better and then we'd talk more. And he told me about the website”—“The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten.”

For the next six months Partain and Ensminger burned through thousands of minutes on their cell phones, going over every detail that had been uncovered so far about the Lejeune contamination and the Navy's handling of it. Partain also contacted a reporter at the
Lakeland Ledger
in Florida, which ran a story about him in September 2007 under the headline, “Florida Man Has Breast Cancer.” The article ran online, and a few days later Partain got a call from a man in Birmingham, Alabama, Kris Thomas, who said he had lived in Tarawa Terrace as a boy at the same time as Partain, in 1968, and had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. “This was incredible,” Partain said. “The whole fact that I had male breast cancer and how rare it is—especially since we had no history of it in our family, people said it had to be a fluke—but this helped confirm for me that it had to be connected to Camp Lejeune.”

Partain finished chemotherapy in November 2007 and was declared cancer-free, but it was a victory that took a heavy physical toll on him. Ensminger had asked him to join the Community Assistance Panel that was providing input on the federal health studies of Lejeune being conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and Partain agreed to go to the next
CAP
meeting in Atlanta on December 6, 2007. “I had just finished
chemo, my hair was gone, and I looked terrible,” Partain said. He arrived at the meeting late, and though the two had not yet met in person, Ensminger knew it was Partain as soon as he walked into the room. “Jerry didn't say it but his face said, ‘You look like hell.' . . . And he told me later that the Marine Corps people looked like they'd seen a ghost.”

From that point on, Partain became fully immersed in the saga of the tainted water at Camp Lejeune. Borrowing from his years as a history teacher, when he would write a couple of dozen facts on the chalkboard and have his students use them to put together a broad narrative, Partain gave himself the same kind of assignment to tell the full story of the base contamination. It would be a task that would consume virtually all of his free time for the next seven months. “I laughed because it was like the kids getting their revenge,” he said.

Ensminger, he said, had an “encyclopedic knowledge of Camp Lejeune,” which actually gave him an advantage over the Marine Corps, because every time someone left a key post involving the Lejeune contamination, a new person would have to come in and learn everything from scratch. “But in order to be effective I realized that you have to communicate that knowledge to people, like members of Congress,” Partain said. He asked Ensminger if the victims of the pollution had a timeline of events that had occurred, similar to the highly selective list that had been put together by the Marine Corps. “He said, ‘No we don't and you need to write it,'” Partain said.

“So I spent from December 2007 to July 2008 working on it all the time,” he said. “I still had to work every day and had to do all the stuff I usually did for the kids, then I worked on it in the evenings.” All the effort paid off with a detailed chronology documenting the pollution problems and actions by the Marines, federal and state regulators, and others involved with the waste
problems from the time Camp Lejeune opened in 1941 to the day it was declared a Superfund site in 1989. The timeline was posted on “The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten” website in time for the
CAP
meeting in July 2008. “And we got immediate validation it was effective,” Partain said.

During the meeting, a Defense Department lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Tencate, made a statement that the Marines had notified people immediately in 1985 when the water contamination was discovered. Partain raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute, this article published in the base newspaper in 1985 says that ‘people were not directly exposed.'” During the next break in the meeting, Tencate and a Marine Corps spokesman, Scott Williams, approached Partain and asked him where he got the information. “I told the colonel it was on our website and, unlike yours, it's all annotated,” Partain said. “He went away in a huff and Williams said, ‘You won't find any smoking guns.' These two clowns doing that made me realize it really bothered them. The timeline really pulled together Jerry's knowledge and all the documents. I felt like, how could they dismiss us now?”

Some of the Marine Corps officials had actually publicly ridiculed Ensminger and his colleagues, knowing there were fewer than a hundred members of their loose-knit organization, “The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten,” Partain said. “The Marines were making fun of us, telling us we should notify all our members,” he said. But after the timeline went up and word spread about it, membership soared to more than 5,000. “The website became the rallying point,” Partain said. “And that was how we started finding the men with breast cancer.”

Among the men who contacted Partain to say he wasn't the only man from Lejeune with a type of cancer that overwhelmingly affects women was Peter Devereaux. A former Marine who was stationed at the base from December 1980 to April 1982, serving
in the 8th Communications Battalion, Devereaux lived in the French Creek area of the base, which got its water from the contaminated Hadnot Point system.

Devereaux said in an interview that as a young Marine, he never suspected there were any problems with the water at the base. “You were nineteen or twenty years old and that was the last thing on your mind,” he said. Working and training in the North Carolina heat and humidity, though, he and the other young Marines “would drink a quart at a time,” he said.

One of the main reasons Devereaux joined the Marines was that he hoped it might serve as a path to his real dream: becoming a boxer on the US Olympic team. He was a self-described “psychotic” about physical fitness—running marathons, boxing regularly, constantly working out—and he absolutely loved it. “The Marines were right up my alley,” he said. “So much teamwork; I loved serving my country. Even through all this stuff it was my best job.”

After Devereaux left the Marines he returned to his home outside of Boston and started work as a machinist, earning extra money on weekends by doing landscaping and taking on small construction projects. Life was beautiful for more than twenty-five years, with a happy marriage and the birth of a healthy daughter, until the morning of January 11, 2008. “I got up early for my ten-year-old child,” he said. “I was forty-five then. I felt like I was getting a little fat, and I came across this lump on my breast and thought it was just fatty tissue. My wife and I talked and we scheduled an appointment—we took immediate action, which is not common for a man. Within a week the doctor called and said I had breast cancer. I couldn't believe it. I'm a guy. I was like invincible. I was training for a marathon. To have any kind of cancer, that's tough, but for a guy to have a woman's cancer, my wife and I were reeling. We had no idea how it happened.”

Devereaux underwent a mastectomy on his left breast and had twenty-two lymph nodes removed. All were cancerous. In the months to follow he endured twenty-nine rounds of chemotherapy and thirty radiation treatments. “Then in August 2008 I got a letter from the Marines about the contaminated water,” he said. “A light went off. It was like one and one is two. It was clear.” His wife, Fiona, went online and found more information about the Lejeune problems, including the website run by Terry Dyer's group, Water Survivors. She posted a message on the site about her husband's breast cancer, and within minutes there was a reply from Mike Partain. “You need to call me immediately,” Partain wrote, and provided his phone number. “I think I was number seven,” Devereaux said.

Partain recommended that Devereaux apply for benefits from the Veterans Affairs Department to pay for treatment of his illness, if only to start a paper trail that he might need to fight for health coverage down the road. Devereaux applied in November 2008 and was denied in April 2009—just as the second stage of his disaster struck. “On April 9, 2009, I was supposed to finish my last treatment, but I could feel in my back and neck a pain that was like a pinched nerve,” Devereaux said. “The doctor said we'll do a scan, and when he got the results he said the cancer had spread to my bones.” Now Devereaux had metastatic breast cancer, for which there is no cure; the doctors told him the average life expectancy was two to three years.

Mike Partain was deeply affected by Devereaux's story, not only because it hit extremely close to home, but also for the support it gave as he built a case that Camp Lejeune had caused a cluster of male breast cancer victims unprecedented in the annals of medicine. Since the publication of the
Lakeland Ledger
story, he had found eight other cases in addition to his own. “That was still a lot for male breast cancer,” he said, “but after seeing how the
Lakeland
story got nine, I realized a national story would do more.” After a Community Assistance Panel meeting in April 2009 in Atlanta, Partain headed to the nearby headquarters of cable news giant CNN and asked to talk to a reporter. As he described his rare disease and said it was probably connected to drinking poisoned water at Camp Lejeune, Partain said, he could tell the reaction was as if he had said an alien spaceship had landed in Georgia. “They blew me off,” he said.

“Then in May 2009 we had a big break,” Partain said. He got a call from Bill Levesque, a reporter at the
St. Petersburg Times
in Florida, who had heard about Partain's quest to find cases of male breast cancer linked to Camp Lejeune. “I talked to him for about two hours and he was really interested in my story,” Partain said. When it was published in the big regional newspaper and went online, suddenly the number of breast cancer cases jumped from nine to twenty men who had spent time at the North Carolina base—many of them now retired in Florida. Levesque followed up with a report about that, too, and within days CNN was calling Partain. “With 20 men they were very interested now,” he said.
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13

A STONE WALL CRUMBLES

Sir, there are a number of actions that I would have changed.