A Trust Betrayed (25 page)

Congressman Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, asked Sinks whether, if he had been living at Camp Lejeune during the time of the contamination, he would have felt comfortable drinking the water.

“Well, I think that I personally would have been using different water and I think that I would have been recommending that an alternative water source was used at that time,” Sinks responded.

“I don't know anybody that would say the opposite of that,” Walden said.

Ensminger and his crew had uncovered another ominous part of the story before the hearing: the Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement division had spent a considerable amount of time looking into whether Marine Corps officials had obstructed government investigations of Camp Lejeune pollution, but the Justice Department had determined that there was not a strong enough case to bring criminal charges.

EPA
investigator Tyler Amon appeared before the subcommittee with the agency's top enforcement officer and verified that he had found some evidence of obstruction, mainly in the way Navy engineers appeared to have been coached in how to answer questions about the contamination. “So criminal charges were considered on obstructing justice?” Stupak asked Amon.

“That is correct, sir,” the
EPA
investigator replied.

“Okay. And then who determined not to bring forth the charges?” Stupak asked.

“The Department of Justice ultimately makes decisions on what is charged,” Amon said.

Peter Murtha, director of the
EPA
's Office of Criminal Enforcement, said the agency's investigation had spanned eighteen months and had included twenty-six interviews with personnel from Camp Lejeune and the Navy Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic Division, or
LANTDIV
. In addition, thousands of documents had been reviewed, and investigators had consulted “extensively” with an expert in drinking-water regulations. “I think one also has to bear in mind, although clearly there is some derogatory information in the investigation that we put together, that it is really a higher bar to bring criminal charges,” Murtha said.

“Under the principles of federal prosecution, the Department of Justice prosecutors need to make sure that they have a reasonable probability of succeeding on the charges that they bring,” Murtha told the subcommittee. “And I think the feeling must have been here that, even though there was evidence of not being forthcoming, that that evidence didn't quite reach the level where there could be a reasonable probability that convictions would be obtained.”

Congressman Ed Whitfield, a Republican from Kentucky, was troubled by the fact that the Navy's environmental engineers had been coached by their superiors on how to handle investigators' questions. “There may not have been any criminal charges, but I think it is a sad day that the investigation shows quite clearly that people were not forthcoming,” Whitfield said. “And like I said, we are very proud of our military, but I think, in this incident, the military leadership failed the men and women who serve this country and their families.”

Another
EPA
official, Franklin Hill of the Superfund office in Atlanta, provided an update on the source of all the problems at Lejeune. “During the eighteen years that
EPA
has been involved in cleanup at Camp Lejeune, we have made significant progress in cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater,” Hill reported. “To date, we have selected remedies at thirty sites within Camp Lejeune and anticipate selection of the last remedy in the year of 2011.” Sixteen other contaminated sites were still under investigation at the base, he said, and all “remedies” were expected to be in place by 2014.

Stupak was not impressed. “Camp Lejeune was listed [as a Superfund site] in 1989,” he told Hill. “That was when it was final, you said. Here we are eighteen years later, and nothing has been cleaned up, has it?”

Hill responded: “Well, we have a couple of sites that we have removed, or we have decided that they have reached their remedial goals. We have had some soil . . .”

Stupak interrupted: “You are close?”

Hill: “We have had a number of cleanups on the site. So the answer to your question, sir, is yes, there have been some cleanups.”

Stupak: “Of the 46 sites, how many have been cleaned up?”

Hill: “That is a good question. I don't want to guess at that, but I know that there are several removals that have been completed.”

Cleanup was also continuing at the property owned by ABC One-Hour Cleaners, which had dumped dry-cleaning solvents over a period of several decades, contaminating the water at Tarawa Terrace, Hill said. “It will go on until we achieve the remedial goals for that site,” he said. “And right now, we are looking at North Carolina standards, which is about 2.8 parts per billion for
TCE
. So that is quite a conservative number. And it will take us some time to achieve that.”

Finally, a representative of the Navy's Office of the Judge Advocate General (
JAG
) gave a status report on claims that had been filed to that point seeking damages from the military for health problems—and in some cases, deaths—that were believed to have been caused by the Lejeune pollution. “As of this date, we have received a total of 853 claims that allege either personal injury or death as a result of exposure to contaminated drinking water while living or working on board Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune,” said Pat Leonard, director of the claims, investigations, and tort litigation division at the Navy
JAG
office. “The majority of the claims are from family members of former service members stationed at Camp Lejeune. Included in that total number are 115 claims from civilian employees who worked on board the base.”

Leonard said none of the claims had been addressed because of the “very complex scientific and medical issues” involved. “It is the Navy's intention to wait for the
ATSDR
study to be completed in order to insure that we have the best scientific research available so we may thoroughly evaluate each and every claim on its own merits,” she said. “We truly believe this approach is in the best interests of both the claimants and the Department of the Navy.”

Dingell, chairman of the full Energy and Commerce Committee, sat in for part of the subcommittee hearing and summed up the proceedings with a single statement. “I find myself somewhat troubled that the military—and I was an infantry man in World War II—doesn't adhere to the maxim that the Marine Corps has, and that is that the Marines take care of their own,” he said.

12

“FLORIDA MAN HAS BREAST CANCER”

They brought me a pink smock with flowers on it.

—
MIKE PARTAIN, SON OF US MARINE STATIONED AT CAMP LEJEUNE

B
orn in 1968 to a Marine who was headed into the teeth of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Mike Partain aspired to a military career like his father and his grandfather. But in a perverse twist, it might well have been the very fact that he was born at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune that would block Partain from following that path.
¹

Partain's grandfather, Warren Partain Sr., had been a Marine in both World War II and Korea. He had enlisted in the Marines in 1939, largely to escape the hardscrabble life of farming and ranching in his hometown of Olney, Texas. He ended up on radio duty in Iceland when the war started, and then he was reassigned to the states as a communications officer. His son, Warren Jr., was born in 1943 on Parris Island, the Marine training base in South
Carolina. At age seventeen Warren Jr. received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, signed by President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally. There was an eerie connection there. When Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Connally was seated directly in front of the president in the limousine, and Warren Partain Jr. would be part of the Naval Academy contingent that marched in his funeral procession in Washington. Following graduation from the academy in 1966, Partain went all over the world as a Marine officer. “His roots were in the Marine Corps; the Marine Corps is family to him,” Mike Partain later said of his father.

Mike Partain's mother was a French Canadian, Lisette Pampalon, whom his father had met while on a training cruise aboard the aircraft carrier USS
Shangri-La
, which made a stop in Quebec City in the summer of 1964. Warren and Lisette were married in June 1966, right after Warren's graduation, and a year later the couple moved to Camp Lejeune, where Warren was assigned as a communications instructor. It was there they conceived their first child while living in the housing at Tarawa Terrace. Mike Partain was born on January 30, 1968, a seemingly healthy baby except for one inexplicable detail: he had a red skin rash all over his body.

Partain's mother hated Camp Lejeune. It was too far removed from the forested vistas of Canada, her son said. “Lejeune is a swamp,” he said. “The butt-crack of the South.” His mother didn't like the taste or smell of the water there, either, “but my Dad said, ‘Just boil it,'” Partain recalled.

When it came time for her husband to ship off for Vietnam in the spring of 1968, Lisette told Warren that if he left her at Lejeune, she and the baby wouldn't be there when he returned. So before he went to war in May, Warren Partain moved his family to California, where his parents had a home near Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the 1st Marine Division.

Warren returned unscathed from Vietnam in July 1969 after serving in a relay battalion for division communications between Da Nang and Okinawa, Japan, the island launching pad for US troops and aircraft during the war. He took an assignment at the Pentagon, and in 1970 he and his wife had their second child, a daughter who was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, DC. Warren Partain retired from the Corps that year, landed a job with Johnson & Johnson in Michigan, and then moved in 1972 to Florida, where he settled with his family in nearby Winter Haven when Mike Partain was four years old.

Besides the strange skin rash at birth, Mike Partain had a number of other health issues growing up. Some seemed routine, such as frequent infections of the nose, ears, and throat, but others were highly unusual. “My toenails were described as rotten,” Partain said. At age thirteen—and four more times over the next five years—he experienced painful swellings in the testicles, a problem most often experienced by sexually active older men. “The doctor asked if I had sex and I asked him what that was,” Partain recalled. There were other problems, usually ones that were never understood by his doctors, throughout his teens and twenties. “I just remember being sick all the time,” he said.

Partain followed a path not atypical for young men in Florida in the 1980s—he worked at Disney World, went to Florida State University and dated a girl there, then, when she broke up with him, let his grade point average slip to 1.9. His father told him he was on his own, so Partain joined the Navy in January 1988. He was assigned to the nuclear program and was sent to the Naval Training Center in Orlando.

Not long after he arrived, the rash Partain was told he had as a baby returned with a vengeance. “It exploded all over my body,” he said. “The only way I could get [the itching] to stop was to jump in the shower and stand in scalding hot water. The Navy sent me to
the hospital and accused me of drinking. But it wouldn't go away.” Partain was diagnosed with atopic dermatitis, which disqualified him from being in the nuclear program. “They discharged me as an erroneous enlistment because I had the rash when I was born,” he said.

Partain recalled that the rash had turned up only periodically in his younger years, and he realized it often recurred whenever he wore suits that had been dry-cleaned. He also discovered years later that there was a plume of groundwater at the Orlando training base contaminated by the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, with
PCE
concentrations as high as 28,000 parts per billion. “I think that's why it came back,” he said of the skin rash that cost him a Navy career.

He came back home in March 1998 and went to work again at Disney World, and married a young woman from Indiana named Margaret in the spring of 1989. They had their first child later that year, and Partain returned to Florida State to earn a history degree in 1992. The couple had a second child, and Partain worked for about five years in sales and as a store manager, then, in 1997, he started teaching high-school history. Kids three and four arrived during his tenure as a teacher, before Partain started a full-time career as an insurance adjuster in 2001. He was promoted to State Farm's office in Tallahassee in 2007.

It was there that Partain's life took an unwelcome turn. “I started feeling tired more than usual,” he said. “I felt drained a lot. Then I went turkey hunting one day, and that night Margaret and I hugged, and her hand hit a bump on my chest. I'm a hairy guy and it felt like a cyst you get with an ingrown hair, but she didn't like it. It was at 2 o'clock above the nipple.”

When the bump didn't go away after two weeks, Partain's wife insisted he have it checked out. The doctor who examined Partain,
he said, “gave me that look that said, ‘I don't really like this,' and asked me to get a mammogram.”

Partain is a tall and burly man who wears a dark goatee—not the kind of patient one would expect to see visiting a treatment center for breast cancer. “You feel stupid, a guy going for a mammogram,” he said. “They thought I was waiting for my wife. When I went in they brought me a pink smock with flowers on it. It took a long time after they did it for them to call me. Then the nurse came in and had that look on her face. Something was really wrong. She said they needed more pictures, a sonogram. You couldn't sledge-hammer a pin up my ass. There was a big white mass, with dots all over it—calcification, a calling card of cancer.”