by Mike Magner
Beneath the base are seven different aquifers, including three with primarily fresh water. Thompson’s sampling found—and later USGS studies confirmed—that water in the deepest freshwater aquifers was still very salty and would require substantial treatment. The best option would be the shallow aquifer known as the Castle Hayne, which ran just below the sandy soils at the surface to depths ranging from 150 to 400 feet underground. The shallow aquifer would have to be managed carefully, though; geological studies had shown that overpumping could cause incursions from brackish streams at the surface and from saltwater aquifers below. Also, geologists warned, during the dry summer months, the Castle Hayne aquifer was slow to recharge, so more wells would be needed than in a perfect artesian field.23
The Marine Corps tapped into the Castle Hayne when the base opened and over the years built more than 100 wells and 8 treatment plants that pumped potable water through 1,500 miles of pipes to more than 7,000 buildings, including those in the major housing complexes at Tarawa Terrace and Paradise Point. The base pumps anywhere from 4 million to 8 million gallons of water each day from the aquifer depending on the season and the population being served, which ranges from under 100,000 to as many as 180,000 people on any given day.24
For the first four decades of Camp Lejeune’s operations, from the 1940s through the 1970s, the water treatment processes used there were essentially the same ones found in most cities across the country: filters removed particles, softeners reduced minerals, and chlorination killed microbes. There were no state or federal regulations for chemical contaminants until the late 1970s, after Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started developing limits for various industrial pollutants that were turning up in drinking water around the nation. It was, after all, the chemical age in the decades following World War II. About all that was known about the thousands of new products brought to the market by new compounds and processes was that they greatly improved the quality of life for millions of people. As for the waste that these advancements produced, an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality prevailed across America. The pollution wasn’t just from steel mills and paper mills and auto plants and other factories spewing emissions into the air and water and dumping hazardous waste on the land. Every owner of a car or truck with a tailpipe contributed to the smog that was choking America’s cities by the 1970s, and every home equipped with a modern washing machine was sending to local waterways detergents that sucked up the oxygen in the water and harmed fish and wildlife.
Two of the most prevalent industrial pollutants in the postwar era were actually sister compounds, trichloroethylene (commonly called TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchloroethylene, or PCE). Their use had exploded since their development as “the safety solvents” in the 1930s. PCE was used mainly as a cleaning agent, particularly in laundry operations, while TCE, a common degreaser, cleaning solvent, and paint thinner, was used in many industrial and commercial processes. The military was a major purchaser of TCE, using large quantities of the liquid solvent to remove grit and grime from planes, tanks, other vehicles, and weapons. And during the early decades of solvent use, it was widely believed that dumping TCE and PCE on the ground had little or no environmental impact, as the chemicals would simply vaporize or become assimilated into the soil.
Until studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s began raising concerns about health effects from exposure to the solvents, there were no limits on their presence in drinking water. Manufacturers did not even provide guidelines for disposal. “There was no reason for industry or the military to focus in on TCE, PCE, or other chlorinated solvents prior to the later 1970s,” said a 2009 consultant’s report to the US Department of Justice on waste-disposal practices at Camp Lejeune. “There were no prior reports of TCE or PCE groundwater contamination. TCE and PCE were not regulated constituents. TCE was not considered a health risk.”25
The same was true for benzene, which is today known as a highly toxic chemical found in gasoline and diesel fuel. But until the mid-1980s, there were no safety limits for benzene in drinking water; the compound was considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.
Dumping chemicals and other toxic wastes was common practice at military bases across the country in the decades after World War II. Before he came to Camp Lejeune as an environmental worker in 1979, Danny Sharpe spent time at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in New Bern, North Carolina, just north of Camp Lejeune. He remembered a clearing in the woods at that base that had two unlined pits, each about thirty feet long by thirty feet wide and about twelve feet deep, where workers dumped chemical and other wastes on an almost daily basis. The smell was horrendous, he said.26
The same thing was happening at Camp Lejeune on a much larger scale. Julian Wooten, the base’s environmental manager in the 1960s and 1970s, said every form of waste generated at the base was either dumped directly on the land or into ditches dug by Marines. Waste oil from vehicles and equipment was also constantly poured on dirt roads to control dust, Wooten said. Sharpe recalled that at least until the early 1980s, waste oils at the base were collected in tanks and then spread over the hundreds of miles of roads that ran through Camp Lejeune.27
In addition, throughout Camp Lejeune, wash racks were used to clean every type of vehicle and aircraft on the base, from tanks and trucks to jeeps and cars, Sharpe said. Powerful solvents were used to remove grit and grease from the vehicles, and the oily chemical mix was washed directly into the storm drains that emptied into streams and creeks around the site. One former Marine assigned to vehicle maintenance at Camp Lejeune in the 1960s, Tom McLaughlin, said fifty-five-gallon drums containing the degreaser TCE were always on hand at the wash-down areas. Workers would pour the sweet-smelling liquid onto vehicle engines and bodies and then hose them down, sending the waste into the floor drains.28
Then there were all the waste dumps at Camp Lejeune—a solid-waste landfill, a garbage pit behind the mess hall, a chemical dump, and scattered sites where drums of pesticides or even chemical weapons were buried. Wooten said he once went to the rifle-range chemical dump with a bulldozer operator to build a trail and mark it with signs, but his eyes were severely burned; he decided he would never go to the site again if he could avoid it.29
Rick Shiver, the state environmental regulator for Onslow County, was asked in 1975 to do an inventory of contaminated landfills or waste sites in the area. Shiver said Wooten gave him a grand tour of Camp Lejeune that year and described what was happening at numerous locations around the base. “I was very surprised to learn of everything they were dumping into their landfills,” Shiver said later. “They were not the garden variety landfills.”
3
“BABY HEAVEN”
We didn’t think anything of it back then, you know, it was just part of life.
—JOAN LEWIS, WIFE OF MARINE STATIONED AT CAMP LEJEUNE
Something was terribly wrong with the babies at Camp Lejeune. When it began isn’t clear, but evidence suggests it was in the 1960s or earlier, a decade or two after the base opened in 1941. Few realized what was happening, and among those who did, it seems certain that at the time no one understood it.
One of the first to see the frightening effect without knowing the apparent cause was Sally McLaughlin, who had married her childhood sweetheart, Marine Sergeant Tom McLaughlin, in August 1962 and moved with him to Camp Lejeune immediately afterward.1
The couple had grown up in New York City, Tom on the West Side near the Hudson River and Sally in the Bronx. They had met in 1957 at a horse farm in Youngsville, New York, about ninety miles north of the city. Tom was just sixteen and enjoying a trail ride when he came across Sally and her best friend, Gail Fox, on their way to Sally’s fourteenth birthday party. Tom was invited to come along and struck up a friendship with Sally that they carried with them back to the city. It didn’t seem like they were destined to marry—Tom joined the Marines right out of high school in 1959,
and the two stopped communicating. But after Tom wrote Sally after the death of her mother in 1962, their attraction rekindled and they quickly married.
Tom was twenty-one and Sally was eighteen when they moved to Camp Lejeune in August 1962. Soon afterward, they had their first child, a daughter named Carrie. They lived in a drab trailer park on the base, but Carrie was a happy and healthy baby, so life was good for the young couple.
Tom McLaughlin was one of sixteen children in his family. “That’s what made me want to join the Marines,” he joked. “I wanted to sleep alone.” He chose the service for another reason, too: once as a boy out on the streets of New York, he was impressed by a group of Marines in their formal uniforms and decided he would wear one someday as well. “I loved the dress blues,” he said.
At Lejeune he was a mechanic in the transport division, and one of his jobs was cleaning vehicles with the powerful degreaser, trichloroethylene. “We’d literally slosh it on our engines,” he said. “We had 55-gallon drums of the stuff. Every motor pool did that.” No one ever gave a thought to whether it was safe to breathe the sweet-smelling vapors from TCE; nor did anyone who lived on the base suspect anything was wrong with the water or with anything else in the environment at the sprawling coastal installation, McLaughlin said.
At the end of his tour at Lejeune in February 1964, McLaughlin reenlisted and was told he could name his preferred assignment. One of the choices was the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, which sounded like paradise to a young couple from New York City just starting a family. A little more than a year into the tour, Sally became pregnant again. After delivering a healthy baby girl three years earlier, she had no reason to expect any problems. But the pregnancy turned out to be difficult, with lots of discomfort from a very swollen abdomen.
When she went into labor on February 5, 1966, Sally sensed immediately that it wasn’t going to be like her last delivery. “Everybody had a grim face,” she recalled years later. “I kept saying, ‘We are having a baby. Why the grim faces?’ Nobody was rushing. It was all very matter of fact. They told me to cross my legs because ‘We are waiting for a doctor.’ They knocked me out.
“I remember the doctor waking me and telling me the baby was dead. I could see her on the table, I could see her naked body and the doctor asked if I wanted to see her face and the nurse said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I just kept saying, ‘She’s cold, why aren’t you wrapping her?’”
It turned out the baby—a girl they named Michelle—had anencephaly, a condition in which most of the brain is missing.
Sally immediately began to question herself—“Did I eat enough vegetables, did I get enough sleep, did I take an aspirin? I just know that for years I didn’t know what I did wrong,” she said later.
The McLaughlins were devastated and totally on their own in their grief, with family and friends thousands of miles away. “Tom and I went alone to Schofield Barracks Post Cemetery [on the base in Hawaii] to have a funeral,” Sally told her local newspaper in Massachusetts in 2007. “We had to borrow money from the Navy Relief because with our life insurance, the baby had to survive for five days and we didn’t have the money. . . . We didn’t notice anything, we were so grief-stricken.” In other words, they received no money from their life insurance policy for the burial, because the baby had not survived long enough to be covered.
More than a year later, after Tom completed a tour in Vietnam, the McLaughlins returned to the cemetery to visit Michelle’s gravesite. “It wasn’t until we went back in 1967, we noticed more rows, but we didn’t make any connection,” Sally McLaughlin said. Then, she said, “We happened to notice the section she was in was all babies, born and died within days. A red flag went up. Why so many babies within a day or two of being born? . . . It gave the years (from the 1950s through the mid-1960s) and Tom and I said what in the world is going on? Why so many babies? It bothered me for years, bothered me terribly.”
Darrell Stasiak and her Marine husband, Paul, encountered an eerily similar situation at Camp Lejeune after they lost a baby there in September 1966. The girl they had named Eileen Marie had actually died in the womb nine or ten days before her mother delivered, the doctors told her later. Paul Stasiak went to Eileen Marie’s funeral alone because his wife was still recovering from the stillborn delivery in the hospital. The burial was in a Jacksonville, North Carolina, cemetery just outside Camp Lejeune, Darrell said years later, after reading the story about Sally and Tom McLaughlin in her local newspaper. “There was a plate there at the time, but years later [Paul] wanted to get a marker,” she said. “I called down there and they said we could only tell you within ten or twenty feet of where she was buried, because we were burying them two or three to a grave at a time in those days.”2
The Stasiaks remained at Camp Lejeune until 1968, and Darrell had two miscarriages in that short time. She also started noticing others having similar tragedies in their families. “We were hearing every week of someone taking a baby home to bury it,” Darrell said. “It was common. We thought it was because we were so young and there were so many of us.”
Many of those infants ended up alongside Eileen Marie Stasiak in a section of the Jacksonville cemetery that came to be called “Baby Heaven” by residents of Jacksonville and former residents of Camp Lejeune. One of them was Ricky Gagnoni, the first child of Maggie Gagnoni and her Marine husband, who was stationed at Camp Lejeune. Maggie was feeding her one-month-old boy in their base housing on October 30, 1970, when he started bleeding from his mouth. Maggie rushed the baby to the hospital, but he died the following day, on Halloween. Gagnoni never received an explanation for Ricky’s death and blamed herself for years afterward.3
The unexplained infant deaths and stillbirths continued through the late 1960s and 1970s. Whole families began to have problems. The experience of the Holliday family was typical. “We conceived a child at Camp Lejeune when we were there in January 1973, and in June my husband John was deployed to the Mediterranean on the USS Guadalcanal,” Louella Holliday said. “I ended up going home to Mississippi while he was away so my parents could help. I had the baby in November at a small country hospital in Canton, Mississippi. (This was a place that still had separate waiting rooms for blacks and whites.)” She described the scene at the hospital following the delivery:
I didn’t expect the baby on the ninth, but he arrived. We had named him John Samuel Holliday Jr. The doctor came in and said my baby died. I was still in the delivery suite and the baby was right there. I said, “I just heard him breathe, just a minute earlier.” The doctor said “No, the baby’s dead.” Then the doctor went out with the baby and came back and said, “You were right, the baby is alive, but you’d better pray for him to die because he’s going to be a vegetable if he lives.” He was breathing on an average of only two or three times a minute. But after carrying a child, you can’t pray for him to be dead.
John Samuel Holliday Jr. did die, about fifteen hours later, on November 10, 1973.
“For all these years I questioned myself,” Holliday said forty years later. “I was just plagued. I had no problems, none whatsoever, until I lived at Camp Lejeune.” Holliday had moved into the Tarawa Terrace housing complex at Camp Lejeune at the beginning of 1973 when her husband was a Navy corpsman assigned to the base hospital. She described her pregnancy that year as one in which she was “violently sick from the beginning to the end.” It was strange, she said, because she had already had two children without any health problems before moving to the base. And her pregnancy wasn’t the only problem: the whole family began having difficulties at Camp Lejeune.
“The kids had these weird things happen,” Holliday said. “Like my daughter, Angela, when she wasn’t even one yet, had such severe nosebleeds that blood came out of her eyes. My son, William, who was four, his face swelled up horribly once and we had to take him to the doctor.”
After the death of her baby, Holliday, then twenty-four, continued to suffer from nausea, vomiting, and dizziness, often
severe enough to require her to go to the base hospital. The doctors were baffled, she said. They eventually became so frustrated with her case that one of the hospital officials suggested that she visit a psychiatrist.
It wasn’t until the family left the base in January 1976 that things began to improve. Her daughter’s nosebleeds dropped off to only once or twice a year, Holliday said. But there would be many more health issues in the years to come.
A woman with the ironic name of Mary Freshwater may have had the most ghastly experiences at Camp Lejeune. Freshwater died of leukemia in January 2013 at the age of sixty-eight. Shortly before her death, she told ABC News that she wasn’t the only one who had suffered—by then the stories of many others from Camp Lejeune were being publicized. Nevertheless, nothing could have prepared her for the horrifying reality she would face in 1977 and the years to come.4
“I was very active with the Officers’ Wives Club,” Freshwater said in the ABC interview with Cynthia McFadden in June 2012. “We were at a party . . . one night. There were five of us in different stages of pregnancy. Every one of us lost their baby to a birth defect.”
Freshwater had had two healthy children before she and her husband moved to Camp Lejeune, but the third child, a son named Russell Alexander Thorpe, lived just one month after he was born on November 30, 1977—with an open spine. “It was really a shocker when he was born that way and then when he died, he died in my arms. He took his last breath,” she said. That was just a little after midnight on the last day of the year in 1977, she said.
Doctors told Freshwater she shouldn’t be discouraged from getting pregnant again. But her next child, a boy named Charles Warren Thorpe, died the day he was born—without a cranium. Freshwater then had a miscarriage of twins before giving up on expanding her family.
