Deadly Dependence 

Page 3 of 6

"I couldn't believe anyone would ignore that, but they did," says Tom Townsend, a retired Marine major who lived at Camp Lejeune in the 1960s. In fact, it was not until February 1985, after 50,000 to 200,000 people had consumed the water, that Lejeune shut down its last contaminated wells, announcing breezily that "two of the wells...have had to be taken off line because minute (trace) amounts of several organic compounds have been detected."

Since then, it has become clear just how inaccurate the words "trace" and "minute" were. The base's Hadnot Point water system contained 280 times more trichloroethylene, a degreasing solvent, than federal standards would allow today. Women who drank the trichloroethylene-tainted water while pregnant with male fetuses were four times more likely than normal to have low-birthweight babies, according to a 1998 study by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Now the agency is studying childhood cancers and birth deformities such as spina bifida in children whose mothers were pregnant at Lejeune. Preliminary findings, released in July 2003 and analyzed by the office of U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.), suggest that the cancer and birth defect rate is more than three times that of the general population.

Marine officials did not return phone calls for this story, but the early study results don't surprise Major Townsend. His wife drank the Hadnot Point water when she was pregnant, and their son Christopher was born with congenital heart defects, along with brain damage and problems with his spleen, liver and pancreas. "Everything was a mess," the father says. "All systems were disasters." The boy died 103 days after he was born. Doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital performed a post-mortem examination, and "the adverse effects noted in the autopsy matched very closely with a number of studies about the effects of volatile organic compounds on infants," Townsend says. "He matched about eight of the 10 on the list."

Since then, Townsend has joined forces with other former Marines to hold the corps accountable. One of his new allies is Jerry Ensminger, whose wife spent most of the first trimester of her pregnancy at Camp Lejeune. Ensminger's daughter Janey developed acute lymphocytic leukemia and died in 1985, shortly after her ninth birthday. Now, almost two decades later, the father still feels disgust when he thinks about how the Marines sat on the well-test data for more than four years. "They figured that they were providing the water to a transient population," he says. "Whatever health effects came of it, these people would be spread all over the world, and no one would be able to trace it back to Camp Lejeune's drinking water."

"I found a bomb in the driveway"
As Jerry Ensminger was gathering evidence of official neglect at Camp Lejeune, he met a retired Marine in his eighties who was in the final stages of a battle with cancer. "The man told me some horror stories," Ensminger recalls. "When DDT was banned, and people turned it in from all over the base, they took it out to a road in one of those tanker trucks that had sprinklers on it, and spread it up and down this dirt road. That's what they did with used motor oil and solvent. When lead paint was banned, they took truckfuls of it into the woods and buried it."

Practices like those, at bases throughout the South, are at the heart of the military's toxic legacy. "For much of the history of the United States, there were no environmental laws," says Steve Taylor, an organizer for the Military Toxics Project, a national watchdog group. "Everybody, including the military, just took stuff out and dumped it." The military wasn't alone in these practices, but its sheer scale dwarfs that of any industrial polluter. What's more, federal cleanup efforts initially focused on the private sector, allowing the armed services to defer responsibility for longer than their corporate counterparts. "Before the late 80s and early 90s, there was virtually no consciousness at either the state or federal level about military environmental contamination," Taylor says.

Defense Department officials offer a simple explanation for these early waste-handling mistakes: They didn't know any better. "These were common practices," says Fred Otto, restoration program manager at Georgia's Robins Air Force Base. "At that point, they didn't realize the impact of solvents and cleaners on the soil and groundwater." Soldiers at Robins disposed of chemicals in a 1.5-acre sludge lagoon from 1962 through 1978; today the lagoon and a nearby landfill are on the Superfund National Priority List. The official roster of contaminants at the site includes mercury, lead, arsenic, benzene, DDT, copper, and carbon tetrachloride.