A Trust Betrayed (31 page)

Miller, chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, was livid. He said he would demand that the Navy turn over all relevant documents and data on Camp Lejeune. “We want to know what did [the Navy and the Marine Corps] know about the water, when did they know[,] and what did they do about it?” Miller told McClatchy's Barrett. “Did they know about it during the 30 years when Marines and families were exposed to the water? Did they know about it and not do anything to stop it?” Navy Secretary
Mabus responded that the
ATSDR
had “full access” to documents on benzene levels at Lejeune—they had been available in a county library in North Carolina since 1992. This just made Miller angrier. “I cannot imagine that this was inadvertent, that this was the result of inadvertence, that there were not officials at the Navy who didn't look at the levels of benzene contamination that came back from tests of water supply wells and did not understand just what that meant,” he said.
⁴⁶

More bad news for the Navy came after William Levesque, whose paper had been renamed the
Tampa Times
, kept digging for information about Lejeune after reporting about the breast cancer problems in 2009. Levesque discovered in March 2010 that the Navy and Marine Corps had failed to provide the
ATSDR
with databases containing more than 700,000 documents, including one estimating that leaks from the Hadnot Point fuel farm exceeded a million gallons. “This is catch me if you can,” Jerry Ensminger told Levesque for his story. “The Marine Corps just wants to delay
ATSDR
's work as long as they possibly can.” The Marine Corps spokesman, Captain Block, again issued what had become the service's standard response. “We are very interested in
ATSDR
completing their work, and the Marine Corps has made every effort to ensure that all information in our possession is available to
ATSDR
researchers,” Block said in a written statement. “We will continue to do so because we are committed to using the best science to get our Marines and sailors, their family members and former residents the answers they deserve.”
⁴⁷

Miller had had enough. He began organizing for a House Committee on Science and Technology hearing on Camp Lejeune that would once again put all the players on the same stage, as the Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing had done in 2007. The session was set for September 16, 2010, under the title “Camp Lejeune: Contamination and Compensation, Looking Back,
Moving Forward.” And the star witness this time around was Mike Partain, the first to provide testimony. “‘You have male breast cancer' were the words which greeted me and my wife on our 18th wedding anniversary,” he began. Partain told of his struggles with the disease nearly forty years after he was born at Lejeune in 1968. A retired Navy medical officer, James Watters, who had been stationed at Lejeune from 1977 to 1979, told of his Stage III kidney cancer. Former Marine Peter Devereaux told of the death sentence he was handed after his breast cancer spread through his bones. “I have a great wife and we have a 12-year-old daughter,” Devereaux said. “This disease has not only ravaged me, it has ravaged my entire family. It has impacted my daughter severely. She is not confident of her future with me and I am not confident of my future with her. I have no idea if I will see my daughter graduate high school, go to college or get married. Before my diagnosis I had been a very productive person. I feel like such a burden to everyone especially my wife and daughter. I am no longer able to work due to the devastating side effects and physical limitations from my treatments and surgeries.”
⁴⁸

Then the panel heard from Major General Eugene G. Payne Jr., assistant deputy commandant at Marine Corps headquarters. “The Corps is and always has been a large family, and we all knew people who were stationed or worked at Camp Lejeune during their military careers,” Payne said. “My first tour of duty was at Camp Lejeune in 1970. Many of my friends and most of the senior leadership of the Corps, both officers and enlisted, were at Camp Lejeune during the period when this water was contaminated. We have a personal and professional interest in finding answers to questions about the health of our Marine families.”

This heartfelt statement was followed by a more surprising one, when Payne was asked by Congressman Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia, if, “looking back over the past 30 years,” there was
“any action or inaction” he “would have changed.” “Sir, there are a number of actions that I would have changed,” responded Payne:

I would—I can't tell you how many times over the last three years in working with this issue on behalf of the Marine Corps, I would have given anything to have rolled back the clock and to have known and to have been able to influence during that era what we know today to be the case. It is astounding some of the things that happened, and I think that they happened for a number of reasons. I think part of it was mentioned earlier. I think we were ignorant, quite frankly, of some of the implications. I think we were lulled into a sense of complacency or at least a lack of urgency by the fact that we were not out of compliance. And I am not trying to excuse what happened. I think that there were many, many errors made on behalf of the Marine Corps. But it is difficult to look back through the lens of 2010 at what we did or did not know, or should or should not have done in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, but there are many things that I would have done differently. There are things I would have done differently five and ten years ago. I have only been working this for about three years and it is—one normally shakes their head and wonders at some of the things that did or did not occur.

The hearing closed with testimony from Christopher Portier, who had been installed earlier that year as director of the
ATSDR
. Portier also made some news, when asked by Broun about the 2009 report by the National Academies of Sciences saying that illnesses could not be definitively linked to water contamination at Lejeune, and that further research would not be any more conclusive. “We are going to go forward and evaluate this population because we believe it is scientifically credible,” Portier responded. “We believe it is the right public health move, and we believe it is
what needs to be done. And so we will do it. And I think that is our answer to the report from the academy.”

Portier added: “In terms of their finding that there is limited information relating
TCE
and
PCE
to disease, I simply need to look at the disease of cancer and point out to them that virtually every national authority or international authority that has looked at
TCE
and
PCE
has labeled it ‘reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen' or a ‘probable human carcinogen.' And so the linkage there is extremely strong. There is no doubt in my mind that these are toxins that you do not want in your water.”

The following month, October 2010, there were two key announcements from the
ATSDR
that backed up Portier's statements at the hearing. A 300-page report on the contamination of the Hadnot Point water system confirmed that more than a million gallons of fuel had probably leaked into the base groundwater in the decades before 1987, and that the Marine Corps had known about it years before it had shut down contaminated wells. “The fact that the Hadnot Point
WTP
[water treatment plant] was substantially contaminated with
PCE
and
TCE
was well known to
USMCB
Camp Lejeune by May 1982; however the Base did not initiate sampling of raw and finished water at the Hadnot Point
WTP
until early December 1984,” the report said.
⁴⁹

Portier also put his views about the National Research Council report on paper in a letter to top Navy and Marine Corps officials. “The review of cancer risks by the
NRC
was incomplete and only partially addressed concerns at Camp Lejeune,” Portier wrote. “Let me be perfectly clear; there was undoubtedly a hazard associated with drinking the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. The epidemiological studies and the associated exposure modeling will hopefully help us to decide on the level of risk associated with this hazard.”

North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan told the
Jacksonville Daily News
that she had discussed the National Academies report with
Portier at a meeting earlier in October 2010 and was pleased to see that his agency was now going on record discrediting it. “The 2009 National Research Council . . . report on Camp Lejeune had significant shortcomings, and failed to identify all contaminants present in Camp Lejeune's drinking water such as benzene and vinyl chloride,” Hagan said in a statement to the newspaper. “The report also failed to provide an accurate picture of the adverse health effects associated with exposure. The report has become a major stumbling block for veterans attempting to receive
VA
benefits associated with their exposures at Camp Lejeune. This faulty report should not be used to determine benefits for our veterans.”
⁵⁰

In fact, the Marine Corps had put the report to exactly that use. Earlier in 2010, it had issued a brochure citing the
NRC
report as evidence that the water contamination at Lejeune did not cause illnesses, and the Veterans Affairs Department was using the brochure and the report to deny disability claims for diseases said to be caused by the base water. Portier told Jerry Ensminger that he would send a letter discrediting the
NRC
report to the
VA
. Ensminger asked the Navy to do the same thing for all former residents of Camp Lejeune.

“It's only fair to ask, now that the federal agency that was created and mandated by Congress to investigate human health exposures at superfund sites has pointed out errors in the
NRC
report, that the Marine Corps would send a copy of this letter out to registrants,” Ensminger said, referring to the tens of thousands of people who had signed up for information updates on the Marine Corps website. The Marine Corps never responded to the request, however, and information about the flawed
NRC
report was never distributed to those most concerned about the contamination.
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14

VICTIMS UNITE

At what point will there be an end to the reports, and meetings, and all the washing of the facts?

—
JODY MACPHERSON, WIFE OF MARINE COLIN MACPHERSON (1957–2004)

A
fter wrestling with the Department of Veterans Affairs for two years, Bob Kahaly, in 2010, became one of the first former Marines to be awarded disability benefits because of exposure to the toxic water at Camp Lejeune. He had been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, and the
VA
had ruled that his cancer could be linked to the tainted water. “I had just had my fifty-fourth treatment,” he said. “I was in trouble. I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad. I was about to lose everything; I was on the verge of foreclosure.”
¹

Kahaly was one of six young men from Jacksonville, Florida, who had joined the Marines together shortly after graduating from Terry Parker High School in 1977. Five of the six ended up at
Camp Lejeune; one did not. Three of the five who went to Lejeune would die of rare diseases before any of them reached the age of fifty; the other two—Kahaly and Frank Oshman—suffered crippling illnesses. Kahaly, now living outside of Jacksonville in Ponte Vedra, Florida, was at Lejeune in 1979 and 1980, working mostly in the French Creek area served by the Hadnot Point water system. “We were sweating all the time,” he said in an interview in 2013, “and we didn't have bottled water. I remember the water had a sweet odor but it tasted nasty. I was a mechanic, so I was also exposed to
TCE
.”
²

Kahaly's lymphoma diagnosis came in 2001, when he was forty-two years old. Seven years later he received a letter from the Marine Corps notifying him about the base water contamination. “When I started doing my homework, basically everything was like puzzle pieces coming together—my buddies dying and all that,” he said. That's when he began applying for full disability benefits in addition to the health care he was provided by the
VA
.
³

Convincing the
VA
that his illness was related to his service at Lejeune was no easy matter. The federal agency had been insisting for a decade that none of the scientific studies that had been done on the situation at the base proved a connection between the water and the health problems people had encountered, and the National Academies of Sciences report in 2009 further entrenched the
VA
's position. But as criticism of the
NAS
report mounted, both from independent scientists and those at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a slow shift began to occur inside the
VA
. In September 2009, John Hartung, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, was awarded a 30 percent disability benefit after he presented a letter to a veterans' compensation board saying that the large cysts on his back and his chronic fatigue were “more likely than not” caused by exposure to toxic chemicals. Hartung, a Marine at Lejeune for six months in 1977,
was one of the first to persuade the
VA
that his ailments were likely linked to the base contamination.

“Every case is different,” Jerry Ensminger said at the time of the award. “You're not going to find a doctor who's going to sign a letter for everybody for every type of ailment they have.” What was needed, he said, was a clear statement from the government—meaning Congress, if the military was not going to make the declaration—that veterans who had lived at Camp Lejeune during the time of the contamination would be entitled to full disability payments if they incurred specific illnesses known to be caused by the chemicals in the water. “What we're trying to do with this legislation is to try to take these hoops and hurdles away from the people so they don't have to deal with this stuff,” Ensminger said in 2009. “The only hurdle these people will have to clear is to prove they were at Camp Lejeune during the years of contamination.”
⁴