When Semper Fi Isn’t Quite Enough
– By Ed Kociela –
When you enlist in the United States military, things change.
Your rights are different, your freedom is restricted, and your life is dictated by a food chain of officers and regulations you’d better learn to respect in a hurry. If an officer says, “JUMP!” you ask, “How high, sir?” on the way up.
There are expectations, great and small, as you are pushed to your physical, emotional, and spiritual limits. Not everybody is cut out for military service, which is OK, but we still need soldiers, sailors, airmen, and women for many reasons.
The thing is, from the moment they raise their hand and take the oath, they are part of a very different world that not only encompasses the traditional duty, honor, and country aspect of the military but one of trust in your leaders and what they ask of you.
That trust has been shattered on many occasions, as history has shown, but the most egregious seems to be what happened to those who served in the United States Marine Corps between 1957 and 1987 at Camp Lejeune, a 246-square-mile base located just outside of Jacksonville, North Carolina where Marines and their families were poisoned by contaminated drinking water containing as much as 3,400 times the amount of allowable toxins. Not only were they exposed to this water, but the higher-ups also went to great lengths to conceal the problem, allowing even more deaths and disease.
It is unforgivable.
There is a myth that when you join the military, you become government property.
While that is not true, you are considered an asset, and as an asset, you are not only to be used as seen fit by the upper food chain of officers and brass but protected as a valuable piece of the armed forces. You can get written up, for example, for getting a sunburn, but when you drink poisoned water, well, that, as we see, is a different matter.
If you have been anywhere near a television the past few months, you have seen copious amounts of advertisements by law offices set up specifically to pursue a lawsuit against the government to seek damages for those whose lives were damaged or ended by cancer caused by those toxins.
It was poisonous solvents that contaminated the groundwater supply at Camp Lejeune — trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, and benzene were the primary chemicals found in the water, but there were at least 70 others that found their way into the wells.
It was known long ago, with the base order in 1974, that the chemicals required safe handling. Nobody listened, and they were dumped or buried near the wells on the base for years. In the mid-1980s, base officials put the wells back online, which was a violation of the law because of the contamination, even though there was more than ample evidence of continued poisoning. It took decades for anything to come of it. It is estimated that, at the very least, 500,000 people were exposed to the contaminated water. It wasn’t until this year that Congress acted, thus opening the door to the lawsuits allowing compensation. Basically, if you lived or worked on the base for 30 days between 1953 and 1987 and turned up with certain cancers or other diseases, you could pull a chit and stand in line.
The Marine Corps has a reputation of being the biggest, baddest, and boldest, and I certainly am not going to challenge their heroics, from Guadalcanal to the Battle of Belleau Wood. I knew a retired major who fought at Iwo Jima and had a cousin well-decorated in Vietnam. I know about USMC’s courage. But, I wonder now how they feel, in the shadow of the burgeoning lawsuit, about that esprit d’corps and Semper Fi that Marines talk about, believe, uphold. I guarantee they were well-versed in how to care for their weapons, whatever shape and size, and what would happen if they did not. It’s too bad the officers in on the toxic dumping didn’t give their human assets the same respect. That’s why this whole thing is almost unbelievable. How could the Corps, in all good conscience and tradition, neglect the most important elements of its force? They are trained to kill the enemy, not their own.
This isn’t the first class action lawsuit against the military. There was one for defective earplugs, one for sexual misconduct, and one currently on the books in Hawaii for contaminated drinking water. And, of course, the federal government has been found culpable, as witnessed by the results of the United States Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which has paid more than $2 billion to those injured or killed by the fallout from nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, which, the late Sen. Orrin Hatch, told me was only a minute part of how many legitimate claims would have to be paid if RECA was expanded beyond its shallow perimeter.
Still, I am outraged each time I see one of the television advertisements seeking claimants to the Camp Lejeune case. It aggrieves me to see how little regard these young men and women were held in.
There is a certain debt that is owed to members of the military — active, discharged, or retired. You do not have to be a veteran to understand that.
It is the military’s responsibility to protect them, whether in harm’s way or elsewhere.
It is the military’s responsibility to care for those who come home with injuries — some visible, some not. This includes leveling the playing field at VA hospitals so the veterans in Smalltown, USA, receive the same kind of treatment as those who happen to be close enough for the excellent services in San Diego.
It is also the military’s responsibility to step up and assist them when they take off the uniform and slip back into civilian life, whether they need help finding work or normalization after serving. There is no excuse for the number of homeless veterans or the horrific suicide rates.
We must do better.
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