A Trust Betrayed (5 page)

After World War I, Lejeune returned to his role as assistant to the commandant, but he and Barnett faced a new problem: with the world at peace, Congress slashed funding for the Marine Corps and reduced the size of the force from more than 75,000 at the height of the war to less than 30,000 in 1919. Barnett became so frantic in his efforts to preserve and promote the Corps that he began to annoy both Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee in Congress, Representative Thomas Butler of Pennsylvania. The two pressured Barnett to resign in 1920—two years before his term as commandant was to expire—and Lejeune was tapped to succeed him.
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Lejeune seized the opportunity to lay the foundation for the mission he had defined for the Corps five years earlier. He immediately reorganized the advanced base force at Philadelphia as the East Coast Expeditionary Force and began staging maneuvers for military brass, key politicians, and even the general public. An astute politician himself, Lejeune knew there was no substitute for
popular support in persuading national leaders to bolster the Corps. He had Marines volunteer for reenactments of Civil War battles, organized a Marine Corps League, and even had Marines help guard the mail from 1921 to 1926, just to show off their reliability and trustworthiness.
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At the same time, Lejeune was planning for a future war in the Pacific, as increasingly industrialized Japan showed signs of wanting to expand its empire beyond Korea, Taiwan, and parts of China. The US Navy's so-called Orange Plan for a Pacific theater of operations was built around an amphibious campaign conducted by the Marines. Lejeune had an ace in the hole to help advance his plans for the new Marine Corps mission: he reminded military and political leaders that although the United States had agreed, along with Japan and Britain, not to build new naval bases in the Pacific for ten years after the end of World War I, there were no limits on the development of mobile forces within the Navy. In 1924, the commandant sent the new East Coast Expeditionary Force of 3,300 Marines to the Caribbean for a massive exercise at Culebra Island. It quickly became clear that there was still much work to do on the maneuvers. During a landing at night, the Marines hit the wrong beach and failed to get all their supplies on-shore. Another exercise was conducted in Hawaii in 1925, this time coordinated with the Army, and more lessons were learned about the need for better landing craft, improved communications, and adequate training.
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Lejeune retired as commandant in 1929 to become superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, but his mission had been accomplished. The stage was set for the Marines to play a pivotal role in the war with Japan that would begin a dozen years later. A final document defining the Marine Corps' responsibilities that was issued before he stepped down said the Corps would conduct
“land operations in support of the fleet for the initial seizure and defense of advanced bases.”
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By 1940, with war clouds hovering over the planet, the Marine Corps had adopted an official manual outlining the strategy and tactics for amphibious landings by an advanced force, and exercises were being conducted regularly in the Hawaiian Islands and the Caribbean. But the Marines were learning that they still needed not only better landing craft, better weapons, and better communications, but also a training base where the operations could come together. The Marine Corps commandant that year, Major General Thomas Holcomb, ordered one of his top aides, Major John McQueen, to “select a pilot . . . get a plane . . . and find us a training center.” After about a month of surveillance over the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Virginia to Texas, the pair was most impressed by the miles of undeveloped beach near the mouth of the New River in North Carolina.
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It didn't hurt that members of Congress from North Carolina were anxious to spur development of a new port that had recently been built with federal funds nearby at Morehead City. The Marine Corps received $14 million for a base called Marine Barracks New River, and by the summer of 1941, Marines were practicing landings on the North Carolina beaches that would prepare them for epic battles at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere in the Pacific Theater of World War II. After the death of John A. Lejeune in 1942, the name was changed to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.
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The base at first had only a summer cottage that served as headquarters, a warehouse placed in a converted tobacco barn, and a tent city for the Marines. But the forests, swamps, and hot weather at Camp Lejeune were ideal training grounds for troops who would be landing on tropical islands in the Pacific during the
war. In fact, a Marine who fought at Guadalcanal was quoted as saying, “If this place had more snakes, it would be just like New River.”
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After the war, the base benefited from a consolidation of the Marines into three divisions, one headquartered at Okinawa, Japan, and two on the mainland: the 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California and the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, which became known as “The Home of Marine Expeditionary Forces in Readiness.” Lejeune became the largest Marine base on the East Coast. Eventually it became a fully equipped base, with schools, commercial strips, movie theaters, a golf course, stocked fish ponds, and recreational beaches reserved for Marine Corps personnel. And for its core mission, the base grew quickly in the postwar era into a massive complex, with an airfield, three urban-terrain battlefields, forty-eight landing zones along the beaches, eighty firing ranges, and enough housing and support buildings to accommodate 180,000 people at any one time. The base also includes an adjacent training facility called Camp Geiger where more than 24,000 Marines go through infantry school each year. “Entrenched into the Marine warrior ethos is ‘every Marine is a Rifleman,' and it is at Camp Geiger where Marines learn and develop their war-fighting skills before they attend their secondary schools to learn their military occupational skill,” according to the Camp Lejeune website.
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A major challenge in developing this enormous base was providing adequate supplies of potable, nonbrackish water to a constantly changing population, particularly in the hot summer months when demand was highest and rainfall was lowest.

As construction was starting at the base in 1941, the Marine Corps asked David G. Thompson, a scientist for the US Geological
Survey (
USGS
), to scope out the best way to provide water at an installation initially projected to house no more than 6,000 Marines at a time. Thompson looked first at the New River and its many tributaries, but he quickly determined that the water was too salty unless it was withdrawn above the tidal flow, perhaps miles upstream. An intake point would also be difficult to pin down because, when the river was running low, the tides pushed farther inland.

Beneath the base are seven different aquifers, including three with primarily fresh water. Thompson's sampling found—and later
USGS
studies confirmed—that water in the deepest freshwater aquifers was still very salty and would require substantial treatment. The best option would be the shallow aquifer known as the Castle Hayne, which ran just below the sandy soils at the surface to depths ranging from 150 to 400 feet underground. The shallow aquifer would have to be managed carefully, though; geological studies had shown that overpumping could cause incursions from brackish streams at the surface and from saltwater aquifers below. Also, geologists warned, during the dry summer months, the Castle Hayne aquifer was slow to recharge, so more wells would be needed than in a perfect artesian field.
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The Marine Corps tapped into the Castle Hayne when the base opened and over the years built more than 100 wells and 8 treatment plants that pumped potable water through 1,500 miles of pipes to more than 7,000 buildings, including those in the major housing complexes at Tarawa Terrace and Paradise Point. The base pumps anywhere from 4 million to 8 million gallons of water each day from the aquifer depending on the season and the population being served, which ranges from under 100,000 to as many as 180,000 people on any given day.
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For the first four decades of Camp Lejeune's operations, from the 1940s through the 1970s, the water treatment processes used
there were essentially the same ones found in most cities across the country: filters removed particles, softeners reduced minerals, and chlorination killed microbes. There were no state or federal regulations for chemical contaminants until the late 1970s, after Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 and the Environmental Protection Agency (
EPA
) started developing limits for various industrial pollutants that were turning up in drinking water around the nation. It was, after all, the chemical age in the decades following World War II. About all that was known about the thousands of new products brought to the market by new compounds and processes was that they greatly improved the quality of life for millions of people. As for the waste that these advancements produced, an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality prevailed across America. The pollution wasn't just from steel mills and paper mills and auto plants and other factories spewing emissions into the air and water and dumping hazardous waste on the land. Every owner of a car or truck with a tailpipe contributed to the smog that was choking America's cities by the 1970s, and every home equipped with a modern washing machine was sending to local waterways detergents that sucked up the oxygen in the water and harmed fish and wildlife.

Two of the most prevalent industrial pollutants in the postwar era were actually sister compounds, trichloroethylene (commonly called
TCE
) and tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchloroethylene, or
PCE
). Their use had exploded since their development as “the safety solvents” in the 1930s.
PCE
was used mainly as a cleaning agent, particularly in laundry operations, while
TCE
, a common degreaser, cleaning solvent, and paint thinner, was used in many industrial and commercial processes. The military was a major purchaser of
TCE
, using large quantities of the liquid solvent to remove grit and grime from planes, tanks, other vehicles, and weapons. And during the early decades of solvent use, it was
widely believed that dumping
TCE
and
PCE
on the ground had little or no environmental impact, as the chemicals would simply vaporize or become assimilated into the soil.

Until studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s began raising concerns about health effects from exposure to the solvents, there were no limits on their presence in drinking water. Manufacturers did not even provide guidelines for disposal. “There was no reason for industry or the military to focus in on
TCE
,
PCE
, or other chlorinated solvents prior to the later 1970s,” said a 2009 consultant's report to the US Department of Justice on waste-disposal practices at Camp Lejeune. “There were no prior reports of
TCE
or
PCE
groundwater contamination.
TCE
and
PCE
were not regulated constituents.
TCE
was not considered a health risk.”
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The same was true for benzene, which is today known as a highly toxic chemical found in gasoline and diesel fuel. But until the mid-1980s, there were no safety limits for benzene in drinking water; the compound was considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.

Dumping chemicals and other toxic wastes was common practice at military bases across the country in the decades after World War II. Before he came to Camp Lejeune as an environmental worker in 1979, Danny Sharpe spent time at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in New Bern, North Carolina, just north of Camp Lejeune. He remembered a clearing in the woods at that base that had two unlined pits, each about thirty feet long by thirty feet wide and about twelve feet deep, where workers dumped chemical and other wastes on an almost daily basis. The smell was horrendous, he said.
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The same thing was happening at Camp Lejeune on a much larger scale. Julian Wooten, the base's environmental manager in the 1960s and 1970s, said every form of waste generated at the base was either dumped directly on the land or into ditches dug by
Marines. Waste oil from vehicles and equipment was also constantly poured on dirt roads to control dust, Wooten said. Sharpe recalled that at least until the early 1980s, waste oils at the base were collected in tanks and then spread over the hundreds of miles of roads that ran through Camp Lejeune.
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