A Trust Betrayed (35 page)

There were complaints about the brochure even before the
EPA
's fall 2011 report appeared. “It suggests there is no problem,” the
ATSDR
's Thomas Sinks said in a January 2011 letter to the Marine Corps protesting its continued use of the brochure. “It understates the potential hazards from the contaminated drinking water and may discourage individuals from participating in planned research studies.” It took six more months of pressure, from both federal health officials and key members of Congress, before the Marine Corps pulled the document off its website in July 2011. But a Marine spokeswoman, Captain Kendra Hardesty, insisted the move was only temporary. “As soon as it is vetted and approved, it will be put back up,” she said. “The secretary of the Navy has seen it, and the commandant will see it soon.”
¹³

An even bigger dustup between the
ATSDR
and the Marine Corps took place in early 2012, at the same time that Congress was considering the legislation to provide health care for victims of Lejeune's pollution. Major General J. A. Kessler sent a letter to the
ATSDR
on January 5, 2012, requesting that information about active water wells at the base be redacted from upcoming studies as a security precaution. “The Marine Corps understands the need to share information with the scientific community,” wrote Kessler, assistant deputy commandant for installations and logistics. “Prudence requires, however, that information sharing be within the rubric of responsible force protection.” The request was met with
derision from Jerry Ensminger, who called it another attempt to suppress damning information. “This is exactly what happens when you have one federal agency investigating another,” Ensminger told the
Huffington Post
, which published an online story about the Marine Corps request.
¹⁴

The cries of foul play grew louder a month later, when the
ATSDR
released another chapter of its continuing water-modeling studies. This time, detailed information about active wells at the base was redacted, as the Marines had requested. “As you know, we provide
ATSDR
with access to the information they need to conduct these studies,” Captain Hardesty told the
Jacksonville Daily News
in North Carolina. “The request to redact was only with regards to public release. It is important for the Marine Corps and
ATSDR
to cooperate, not only in the search for science-based answers regarding the Camp Lejeune Historic Drinking Water issue, but also in the safekeeping of critical infrastructure information.”
ATSDR
officials defended the redactions, saying the failure to disclose specific data about well locations did not compromise the integrity of the water-modeling studies. Thomas Frieden, director of the
CDC
, which has responsibility for the
ATSDR
, wrote members of Congress to assure them that the new report included only “limited redactions,” which had been allowed “because the longitude and latitude coordinates of active drinking water infrastructure was scientifically unnecessary for the purpose of the document.”
¹⁵

As soon as Frieden's letter to members of Congress became public, the chief hydrologist for the water-modeling study, contract engineer Robert Faye of the Eastern Research Group, wrote a strong letter of protest to
ATSDR
Director Christopher Portier. Faye said Frieden's statement that precise well locations were not important to the study was “patently false on its face and, from a scientific point of view, borders on the inane and silly.” In fact, the only way a scientific study has integrity is if all information is public
so that peer reviewers can replicate the results in independent laboratories, Faye said. “I want to state for the record herein that, as a matter of professional ethics and common sense, I did and do totally disagree with
ATSDR
's policy decision to redact data,” Faye told Portier.
¹⁶

Faye said in an interview later that Frieden's letter to Congress implied that he and the
ATSDR
engineer in charge of the modeling studies, Morris Maslia, were willing to compromise on scientific integrity, which would be seen by their peers as unethical behavior. Not only did he want to clear his own reputation, but he felt he needed to defend Maslia, who was prohibited by the
ATSDR
from commenting publicly on the ongoing studies. “I have absolute personal knowledge of this,” Faye said in the interview in June 2013. “Morris Maslia is one of the most ethical, upstanding individuals I ever worked with. He fought tooth and nail to maintain the integrity of the program.”

The letter from Faye made its way to Capitol Hill and prompted a request by Senator Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, for an investigation by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the
CDC
and the
ATSDR
. “The hundreds of thousands of veterans and their families who lived at Camp Lejeune are anticipating that the
ATSDR
reports will provide them with the information they need to become informed about the scope and severity of the water contamination and educate them on the possible association between their exposures and current and future health effects,” Burr wrote to Inspector General Daniel Levinson.
¹⁷

Ensminger also raised the issue of the Marine Corps' redactions at a March 2012 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The federal agency investigating the contamination “estimates that as many as one million people were exposed to horrendous levels of carcinogenic chemicals through their drinking water at Camp
Lejeune,” Ensminger told the committee. “These people need the uncensored truth concerning their exposures so they can be more vigilant about their and their family's health.” Other members of Congress joined the chorus of protests, but their efforts fell short. When the final modeling study for the Hadnot Point water system at Camp Lejeune was published in March 2013, much of the information about the wells was redacted.
¹⁸

Against the backdrop of Marine Corps stonewalling, Congress slowly worked its way toward action on Lejeune's contamination and its effects. Legislation enacted in 2011 called for a report by the end of the year on the processing of claims by enlisted personnel and veterans seeking health benefits and compensation for environmental exposures on military bases. In the House, Democratic congressmen Brad Miller of North Carolina and John Dingell of Michigan were pushing a bill to provide health care for victims of Camp Lejeune's contamination and were facing minimal resistance.
¹⁹

The Senate was a different story. In early 2011, at the start of the 112th Congress, North Carolina's Senator Burr reintroduced the same bill he had sponsored in the previous Congress, the Caring for Camp Lejeune Veterans Act. Cosponsored by his Democratic colleague from North Carolina, Senator Kay Hagan, the bill would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide health care for any current service member, veteran, or family member who had been exposed to water contamination at Camp Lejeune before tainted wells were shut down in 1985. “We now have another shot at doing the right thing for the thousands of Navy and Marine veterans and their families who were harmed during their service to our country,” Burr said. “While we continue to seek more answers, we can minimize further suffering by allowing Lejeune veterans and their families to receive the care they need and deserve.”
²⁰

Members of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, including its new chairman in 2011, Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington, had a different idea than Burr and Hagan, however. They argued that since the Defense Department had been responsible for the pollution at Camp Lejeune, the Pentagon—not the
VA
—should pay for the victims' health care. There were several problems with that approach, though. First, the Defense Department's health-care program, known as
TRICARE
, operated a little differently in every state, depending on which insurance providers and medical services had been contracted. There were concerns among veterans, who were enrolled in the
VA
's health program, that if they went to a
DOD
provider and mentioned their exposure to contaminants at Camp Lejeune, they would be met with blank stares. At least the
VA
had a national program and its employees could be trained to be aware of potential health problems caused by Lejeune's drinking water. More important, veterans such as Ensminger who had been fighting the military over the Lejeune pollution no longer trusted the
DOD
to be sympathetic to their health problems. They could foresee enormous difficulties getting care if the Defense Department was responsible for providing it. And finally, there was resistance to having the
DOD
fund veterans' care in the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was responsible for the Pentagon's budget. Senators on the committee were aware of all the litigation pending against the military over the Lejeune pollution, and they knew that any law stating that the Defense Department must be held responsible for the damages it had caused would open the door for thousands of claims for compensation.

Of course, there were concerns about Burr's bill coming from the Veterans Affairs Department.
VA
Administrator Eric Shinseki made clear in statements to Congress that if everyone who spent time at Camp Lejeune was eligible for health-care coverage from
his agency, as many as a million new people could be added to its rolls at a cost exceeding $4 billion over ten years. Veterans' groups heard this and called it a travesty if family members were put ahead of veterans for health care at the
VA
. Number crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office (
CBO
) did the required analysis of Burr's bill and found the
VA
's cost figure to be inflated because it assumed that all of the estimated million people who spent time at Lejeune before 1985 were still alive in 2011. The
CBO
cut that estimate down to around 650,000 people who potentially had been exposed and had not yet passed away, cutting the cost estimate for
VA
coverage nearly in half. Then Burr and his cosponsor agreed to limit the eligibility for coverage to people who had spent a minimum of thirty days at Camp Lejeune between 1957 and 1987; in addition, only specific types of diseases that were linked to the base contaminants would be covered. Those were the fourteen specific health problems that had been listed in the 2009 National Research Council report as potentially linked to the Lejeune pollution—esophageal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, leukemia, multiple myeloma, myleodysplasic syndromes, renal toxicity, hepatic steatosis, female infertility, miscarriage, scleroderma, and neurobehavioral effects—plus one more added by Burr's staff at the request of victims, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The limitations helped to reduce the projected cost of
VA
health care for Lejeune victims to less than $350 million over five years.

In the middle of 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that its office in Louisville, Kentucky, that was handling all Camp Lejeune water cases had so far received more than 2,300 claims, but had approved only about a quarter of them. Victims of the contamination stepped up their pressure on Congress. Nearly forty of the men with breast cancer who believed
their cancer had been caused by Lejeune's water sent a letter to President Obama urging him to support Burr's legislation. “We, the undersigned, are constituents of the largest male breast cancer cluster ever identified—73 men,” the letter said. “What happened to us is no coincidence.”
²¹

Former senator Elizabeth Dole, who had lost to Hagan in North Carolina's Senate election in 2008, weighed in with an oped piece that was published in a number of newspapers in January 2012. “The contamination of Camp Lejeune's water supply, which involves several hundred thousand Marines, sailors, their families and civilian employees who were posted to the installation from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, is a sad chapter in the Marine Corps' otherwise superlative history,” Dole wrote. “Much of the human suffering caused by this problem could have been avoided if, years ago, some educated soul had picked up the phone and requested a water analysis, if only to err on the side of caution.” Dole said it was now up to Congress to address the problems by providing medical care for victims of the contamination. “The cost of that care may eventually be high in terms of dollars,” she said. “We must, nevertheless, meet our nation's ethical and moral responsibilities.”
²²

In the spring of 2012, Ensminger enlisted an online group,
Change.org
, to start a petition drive demanding that Congress assist Lejeune's victims. Within a few weeks it had more than 100,000 signatures. “I hear from people who are suffering from the water every day,” Ensminger said. “We need action, and we can't wait any longer.” Finally, Congress responded. After passionate pleas for support on the Senate floor by Burr, Hagan, and Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Murray, the Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent (with no roll-call vote needed because no objections were raised) on July 18, 2012. Two weeks later the bill
sailed through the House on a voice vote and was headed to the White House for President Obama's signature.
²³

When Obama signed the bill on August 6, 2012, standing beside him in the Oval Office were Jerry Ensminger and Mike Partain; the two producers of the
Semper Fi
documentary, Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon; and two members of Congress, Democrat Brad Miller of North Carolina and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, a Republican from Florida. It was a heady moment for Ensminger. “I never expected to be in the Oval Office, and I never expected to get a bill passed by the House and the Senate,” he said. The signing ceremony lasted only a few minutes, but it was an experience Ensminger and Partain would never forget. As they walked out of the White House on a hot summer day, Ensminger recalled that he could hear the sound of the presidential helicopter rising from the South Lawn. Obama was on his way to an event for his 2012 reelection campaign, knowing he had just gone a long way toward securing the support of thousands of former Marines.