A Trust Betrayed (32 page)

Until that happened, veterans seeking disability benefits for their exposure to toxins at Camp Lejeune faced a mountain of frustration from the
VA
. Six months after applying in 2008, in the same month he learned that his breast cancer had spread through his bones, Peter Devereaux was denied compensation. He and his wife set about preparing a new application for
VA
benefits, this time with a binder filled with information about his disease, his exposure to contaminants at Camp Lejeune, and a letter from his doctor establishing a clear link between the two. The whole process required about eighty hours of work, including sitting through a one-hour hearing with a decision review officer for the
VA
, all while Devereaux was going through time-consuming and debilitating treatments for his cancer. “Finally everything fell into place,” Devereaux said. The letter from the
VA
approving a full package of benefits arrived in June 2010, two and a half years after he had been diagnosed with breast cancer and more than a year after he had been told he
might only have two to three years to live. The key, he said, was a so-called “nexus letter,” signed by a doctor, stating that his disability was “more likely than not” caused by something that happened to him during his military service.

Tom Gervasi, a Florida retiree who had served at Lejeune in the 1950s, had to fight the same battle as Devereaux. Gervasi spent two years in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, spending much of his time in North Carolina working and training in the heat and drinking tainted water from a canteen. He left Lejeune in 1956 with a wife and a baby on the way and spent the next forty-five years in his hometown of Rochester, New York, working mainly as a police officer and later as an investigator for the district attorney's office. Two years after moving to Florida in 2001, Gervasi was diagnosed with breast cancer. His doctor told Gervasi that he was only the second man he had treated for the disease in his career.

A mastectomy was followed by chemotherapy in 2004 and 2005, and Gervasi felt like he was getting better. “My hair came back,” he said. “And in 2009 I had a
CT
scan and they said I was cancer-free.” His joy was short-lived. Two weeks later he was back at the hospital with a fever. The doctor came in after more tests were done and reported that Gervasi had bone cancer throughout his body. It wasn't until 2011 that Gervasi learned about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune. A cousin told him she had read an article about environmental issues at the base, and Gervasi's wife went online and found out about Mike Partain. “I ended up going to a meeting in Tampa later with him and Jerry Ensminger,” Gervasi said.

Once he learned about the long history of water contamination at Lejeune, Gervasi was a man possessed, despite the weakness caused by the cancer spreading through his body. “I read an article in the paper about an Army guy with cancer trying to get
VA
help,
so I called his wife and she referred me to a reporter, Donna Koehn, at the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
, and she was fantastic,” Gervasi said in an interview in June 2013. “She spent three hours here and we made the front page and the whole
page 8
. This was back in October just before my birthday. Donna wrote other articles. Every time I got a denial letter I let her know. Jerry [Ensminger] and Mike [Partain] said contact your senators—so I called Rubio and Nelson,” he said, referring to the two senators from Florida, Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bill Nelson. “Rubio gave me to Terry Finger on his staff, and she called me two or three times a week. She worked very diligently on my case. It took thirteen months and finally . . . after three rejections, the director of the
VA
agreed to honor my claim, I think to shut me up.”
⁵

Gervasi said the process with Veterans Affairs can be grueling. “You need to make a lot of noise,” he said. “The
VA
is going to shut you down. You're just a piss pot to them. They generate papers and paperwork and you submit and then they want it done again.”

It was the same story over and over for former Marines seeking disability benefits for the harm they believed had been done to them by Lejeune's drinking water. The process almost always involved rejections followed by time-consuming appeals for those who didn't give up, and sometimes even required help from friends in high places in Washington. Tom McLaughlin of Hampden, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2007, more than four decades after the two-year stint that he and his wife, Sally, did at Lejeune. They had a child who had died shortly after she was born with part of her brain missing. After learning about the tainted water at the base, Sally McLaughlin immediately wondered if it was connected to her daughter's death, and when her husband came down with kidney cancer, her suspicions became certainty. Tom had been a mechanic at Camp Lejeune and had
been exposed to the toxic solvent trichloroethylene at work. He and his wife had also been exposed to both
TCE
and its sister cleaning solvent,
PCE
, in their drinking water at home. It took three full years, and help from the two senators from Massachusetts at the time, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, for the
VA
to approve Tom McLaughlin's application for disability benefits. The decision finally came through in June 2010. Six months before that, Sally McLaughlin had died from stomach cancer. “I give her most of the credit,” McLaughlin told the local newspaper after he got the news about his benefits. “She was the one who pushed it, who did most of the legwork. I just threw up my hands and said this will never happen. But she was very tenacious. She wouldn't give up on this.”
⁶

By September 2010, a top official of the
VA
, Thomas Pamperin, told a congressional committee that about two hundred veterans had sought benefits for disabilities connected to Lejeune's tainted water, but only about twenty had been approved. In most cases, Pamperin said, the requests were denied because the veterans did not establish a clear “medical nexus” between exposure to toxic chemicals and their diseases. A few months after the hearing, under pressure to be more responsive, the
VA
opened an office in Louisville, Kentucky, just to handle claims from veterans who had spent time at Camp Lejeune. More than a year later, in April 2012, the
VA
reported that more than 1,200 claims had been submitted to the office, but still only about a quarter of them had been approved.
⁷

The frustration among victims was reaching a boiling point. A doctor from South Carolina named Paul Akers had lived at Lejeune as a young boy in the 1950s when his father was a Marine stationed there. Once he learned about the chemicals in the water in 2009, he started to make sense of his mother's death from cancer in 1960, his sister's death from cancer in 2009, and his own diagnosis
of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma not long before that. Akers decided to volunteer for the
ATSDR
's Community Assistance Panel to offer his medical expertise, and after just a few meetings he vented to the agency's scientists. “There are only three cases of cancer in my family: my mother and my sister and myself,” he said at a
CAP
meeting in April 2012. “They're both deceased, okay? When is bench work going to be done to prove that we were victims of contamination? We do water models, and I appreciate statistics, but I want to know when somebody's going to sit down at the bench and do some hard science to determine can these agents cause what we're being diagnosed with. I mean, we can do large trends, of course. I want—I would like for someone to sit down and say yes,
PCE
can produce non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Hard science.”
⁸
Akers would never know if his plea was heard—the cancer took his life in February 2013.

One former Marine, Colin MacPherson, who had been born at Camp Lejeune and had later served there for a decade, couldn't even get a proper diagnosis from
VA
doctors of an aggressive form of prostate cancer that took his life in 2004. “He died never knowing what poisoned him,” his widow, Jody MacPherson, told the
St. Petersburg Times
in 2009. In a blog post she wrote the year before the
Times
story was published, Jody MacPherson told how her late husband had been misdiagnosed until two years before his death and had been denied benefits from the
VA
. She had lost her home to foreclosure when her husband's life insurance didn't pay out either. “I miss my husband,” Jody MacPherson. “He died a horrible death. He died a quiet hero. Colin lost his battle with the
VA
, and with life. I feel it is too late for my family, our lives are already shattered. I can't get Colin back. My kids can't get their father back. We can't get Colin's father back, who had also died young of leukemia. I want to know how many more will die before the Marine Corps and Congress decide enough is enough? At what
point will there be an end to the reports, and meetings, and all the washing of the facts? When can our heroes rest in peace?”
⁹

The way that Marines and their families learned about the water contamination was almost as painful as the illnesses it caused, with the information coming decades after the fact and in language couched in euphemisms by the military. Lou Freshwater, whose mother Mary had lost two babies at Lejeune and later died of cancer, recounted how she had learned about the cause of those problems in a personal 2012 blog post entitled “Poisoned by Your Own Government: My Camp Lejeune Story.” “In what is a world-class bureaucratic insult, the Marine Corps calls what happened ‘Historic Drinking Water' instead of the largest water contamination incident in our nation's history,” Freshwater wrote. “Almost certainly because of exposure to my government's historic water, last March my mother was diagnosed with two types of acute leukemia. The genetic testing came back with the cause being Benzene exposure.”
¹⁰

Internet postings of blogs and news stories did more than anything else to bring Lejeune victims together and help them blow up the endless denials and obfuscations by the military. After the Florida media reported Kahaly's success in getting
VA
disability benefits in 2010, he began hearing from other veterans with similar difficulties. “So many were calling it was crazy,” he said. “I thought I'd try to get others to help.” So in 2012 Kahaly founded the Poisoned Patriots Fund of America, a nonprofit that raises money to assist veterans affected by military contamination. “We're helping more than a hundred families now,” he said in the spring of 2013.

Mike Partain might never have uncovered the apparent cluster of breast cancer cases among men exposed to the Lejeune water without the networking made possible by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. By the middle of 2013, Partain had tracked
down eighty-four other men besides himself who had spent time at the base and were later diagnosed with breast cancer, an astonishingly high number for a type of cancer that occurs in men only about 2,000 times per year, compared to 200,000 annual cases among women. Some of the men Partain had found by 2010 decided to make a statement and raise some money for the cause by posing with their shirts off for a calendar. They gathered for the photo shoot at the Liberty Hotel in Boston, where Peter Devereaux was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. “When we took our shirts off, we were all checking each other out,” Devereaux told a reporter later, doing his best to put a positive light on a dire situation. The 2011 calendar, entitled “Men, Breast Cancer and the Environment,” sold several hundred copies within a month after it became available in October 2010, further raising public awareness about the problems at Camp Lejeune.
¹¹

Credit for the first website devoted to the health problems caused by Lejeune's water went to the two sisters, Terry Dyer and Karen Strand, whose father was the school principal who died in 1973 after fifteen years on the base. Their Water Survivors site, launched in 2002, had people connecting for a common cause years before social media exploded with Facebook and Twitter. Ironically, though, the way the site was managed ended up dividing victims into two camps rather than uniting them in battle with the Marine Corps. Dyer and Strand invited former Lejeune residents to share stories about what had happened to them, but only under certain conditions. People were required to register with the sisters before posting comments on the website, and they could only do so under pseudonyms and without providing any personal information, such as their phone numbers or hometowns. Violators of the rules, which the site managers said would allow people to speak out while preserving their privacy, would be banned from future access.

Ensminger joined the Water Survivors group early in his quest to uncover information about his daughter's death from leukemia, but he quickly found himself in trouble with Dyer. After Ensminger was quoted in a news story, Dyer told him he should not do any press interviews without her permission. The scolding did not sit well with the former Marine drill instructor, fast emerging as a forceful and outspoken advocate for victims of Lejeune's pollution. No one was going to get him to pull the reins on his charge against the Marine Corps.

Jeff Byron, too, said he joined Water Survivors for a time, but soon left. “They wanted to control every aspect of it,” he said. “They also were afraid civilian employees like their father wouldn't get justice. They didn't trust the Marines.” Byron shared his frustrations with Ensminger, and the two decided to start their own site with no holds barred. They brashly borrowed the well-known Marine Corps recruiting slogan—”The Few, the Proud, the Marines”—and tweaked it into an online statement about how they felt they had been treated: “The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten.” Byron's web-savvy daughter Andrea helped set it up, and
www.tftptf.com
was born in 2003.