by Mike Magner
The year 2000 brought similar revelations to others. Louella Holliday, whose baby conceived at Camp Lejeune died just hours after his birth in 1973, saw a news report about the base’s water problems. “I was watching TV getting ready to go to work and heard about Camp Lejeune and contaminated water,” Holliday said. “I didn’t catch the whole report, so I went to work and looked it up on the Internet. All the sites directed me to ATSDR. I had no idea what that was. . . . A lot of information came in the mail. That’s when I finally realized, it wasn’t me.” Not only did she and her husband lose a child after living at Camp Lejeune, but Louella lost the good health she had enjoyed as a girl and young woman. “I’ve been through a whole plethora of ailments,” she said. “It’s easier to say what I haven’t had.” The more she learned about the poisoned water—and the fact that the Marines had failed to inform her about it—the angrier Holliday became. “I could not imagine that Marine Corps officials had knowledge of this contamination for so many years without divulging it to the masses that had been adversely affected by it,” she wrote on a website for victims of the base pollution.3
A report in 2000 on CNN about the contamination led Terry Dyer and her sister, Karen Strand, to ask for information from the ATSDR. They instantly saw a possible link with the sudden death of their father, John Fristoe, in 1973 at the age of forty-five, after he had worked for fifteen years as principal of an elementary school at Camp Lejeune. They also realized that their own spate of health issues, including bladder cancer, a miscarriage, hysterectomies, and cysts, and the severe mental and physical disabilities of their younger sister, Johnsie, might be linked to their childhoods at the base. “It all came together for me,” Dyer told a reporter for The Veteran in 2004. “I was on the phone to ATSDR the very next day. That was when I understood that the Marine Corps had not been honest with us. And that we deserved answers.”
Dyer and Strand concluded that the Marine Corps had robbed their father of his prime years. “He missed his children growing up,” Dyer said to the reporter. “He missed our marriages; he missed his grandchildren. And I’m convinced the water deprived my [younger] sister of any kind of normal life. So what should we do? Nothing? Let it pass? What would you do if this was about you or your wife or sister or your children?”4
Around the time that the Gros, Lewis, Holliday, and Dyer/Strand families were learning about the possible causes for their tragic illnesses, two hit movies appeared about heroes fighting corporate polluters, A Civil Action in 1998 and Erin Brockovich in 2000. Dyer contacted the model for the heroine of the latter movie, a California woman who teamed up with lawyer Edward Masry to win a $333 million settlement for victims of water poisoned by Pacific Gas & Electric. Masry’s law firm wouldn’t touch Dyer’s case because it involved taking on the US military, Dyer said. She also called attorney Jan Schlictmann, the lawyer, played in the movie by John Travolta, who nearly went bankrupt suing W. R. Grace Corporation for contaminating the water in Woburn, Massachusetts, with trichloroethylene. Schlictmann didn’t want to enter another lengthy legal battle over toxic pollution, but he offered some advice to Dyer over the phone: go to the media with your story, organize for political action, and start a website to spread the word. “He asked me if I was ready for a roller-coaster ride,” Dyer said. “He said it’s gonna tear your heart out; it will be very hard.”
Inspired by the celebrated attorney’s advice, the sisters went to work. Dyer set up meetings in Washington with members of Congress, including North Carolina’s senators in the early 2000s—John Edwards, Jesse Helms, and Elizabeth Dole. The ultraconservative defense hawk Helms wouldn’t meet with Dyer and her colleagues, but Dole, who succeeded Helms after his retirement, met with a group of Lejeune victims for more than an hour and at one point had tears in her eyes listening to their stories, Dyer said. Back home in Wilmington, North Carolina, Dyer and Strand organized a group they called The Stand, an acronym for Toxic Homefront Empowered Survivors Take All Necessary Defense. And in the fall of 2002, they set up a website named Watersurvivors.com to allow people who lived at Camp Lejeune to connect and share their stories. Dyer also had another goal in mind: “I started the website so I could help people get health care and compensation,” she said.
Within a few months, more than 150 former base residents had landed on the site and posted tales of woe about problems that might have been caused by tainted water: cysts, tumors, ulcers, headaches, rashes, polyps, sore joints, birth defects, anemia, and diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and cancer. The numbers grew exponentially as word about Camp Lejeune’s water spread through the media. Dyer and some of her newfound colleagues added documents about the environmental problems at the Marine Corps base to the website and posted forms that victims could use to file claims against the government.
Among the many victims who were drawn to the site after hearing about the ATSDR study was Sandra Carbone, who had lived at Camp Lejeune with her parents, four sisters, and brother from 1968 to 1971. The granddaughters of a Cherokee scout for the Army and the daughters of a Navy veteran, Carbone and a younger sister, Anita Roach, had both joined the Army to help pay for college. (Carbone said in an interview that she had passed the test for admission to the United States Naval Academy in 1974, the first year it was opened to women, but a sexist recruiter who didn’t agree with the policy submitted her application late and she was disqualified.) Carbone served as a linguist with the Army Security Agency (ASA), as a clerk in the agency’s communications division, and later as a specialist in electronics. Roach joined ROTC between her junior and senior years at Northwest Missouri State University, but she suffered a severe spinal injury during officer training that required surgery. She had to drop out of college a semester before graduation.5
All that they gave for the military was nothing compared to what Carbone and Roach believe the Marine Corps took from them and other members of their family. Carbone summed it up in a posting on a website for Lejeune victims in which she listed a long series of serious health problems plaguing her, her mother, and her three sisters. In 2001, the ATSDR sent Carbone’s mother a questionnaire asking about her health and that of her son, who had been born at Lejeune. When Carbone read the explanation for the survey, describing contaminated water at the base during the time her family lived there, “I just flipped,” she said. “I think all of our health issues are related because we were all healthy before we moved to Camp Lejeune.” Later studies by the ATSDR and other scientific agencies listed fifteen specific diseases that could be linked to the contaminants in Lejeune’s drinking water. But given how frightening the initial information was about the contamination, there was a tendency for people to blame all kinds of health problems on their exposure.
“We’ve had crazy stuff in our family,” Anita Roach said. “We never had any of these things in our family before we lived at Camp Lejeune. . . . My brother was born with lead poisoning. How else do you explain that? When we were growing up there it was instant milk, Tang and Kool-Aid, all with water right from the tap.”
Carbone went online to search for information and came upon Watersurvivors.com, Dyer’s website. She e-mailed Dyer to tell her about her family’s health issues. “She replied that it was her, Terry Fristoe, which was her name in high school,” Carbone said. “We had been best friends at Camp Lejeune.” Reconnected, the two talked about their time at the base and all the problems they had while living there and in the years after they left. Dyer was angry about what had happened, but Carbone said she tried to turn something horrible into something positive. “Instead of getting super angry and mad, we can show the world what water contamination can do to you,” she said.
Jeff Byron also linked up with Dyer and her group after he learned about the contamination in May 2000. Byron and his wife, Mary, had been preparing for a trip from Ohio to North Carolina to show his daughters, Andrea and Rachel, where they were born while he was stationed at Camp Lejeune. The Byrons had no idea what had caused their daughters’ extensive health pro
blems until they received a letter on May 27, 2000, from the National Opinion Research Center, on behalf of the US Department of Health and Human Services, asking them to participate in a health survey because they lived at Tarawa Terrace during a period when the water was contaminated. Once the Byrons got past the initial shock of learning the Marine Corps had apparently poisoned their two daughters, they had another major concern. The survey asked only for information about Rachel, who had been conceived and born while the family lived on the base; it did not ask about Andrea, who was born two months before they moved into base housing. Byron contacted the ATSDR to inform the agency that after moving into Tarawa Terrace, Andrea had two of the maladies listed as possibly being connected to the water contamination, cleft palate and spina bifida. He was later informed that at least one of those qualified as a birth defect of concern, so Andrea would be included in the survey as well. But what really gnawed at Byron was the fact that he was only hearing about the tainted water more than fifteen years after his family was exposed to it. “It was clear to me after reading the questions in the survey that the Marines had been aware of this situation for a long time,” he said.6
Jeff Byron was angry, but not at the institution he loved, just its leaders. “I signed up to take a bullet for my country. My daughters didn’t,” he said. “I still love the Marine Corps. They did a lot of good things for me. We had good memories, and a lot of friendships.” But now, Byron said, “I want them to be faithful to me.” The Byrons filed damage claims against the Defense Department—$3.5 million for Andrea and $4 million for Rachel. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. “We want our children taken care of medically.”
He also joined The Stand, volunteering to be on the group’s board. “It’s not just for the Byron family; it’s for all these people,” he said. “We want to make sure they get help.”
Tom Townsend, now in Moscow, Idaho, learned about the water contamination from a veterans’ newsletter, not a government health survey. Though he and his wife had lost their son, Christopher, less than four months after he was born at Camp Lejeune in 1967, the federal agency was studying health problems only among babies born at the base after 1968, when computer records became available. Townsend asked his wife, Anne, to contact the agency mentioned in the newsletter, the ATSDR, and soon afterward an official there told the retired Marine couple that their infant son would be included in the survey. “Some thirty-three years later we were learning that the death of our three-and-a-half-month-old son from a congenital heart defect was the result of in-vitro [sic] contamination from the drinking water at Camp Lejeune,” Anne Townsend wrote shortly after discovering what had happened. “Now there is a certain sense of relief in knowing that the cause of the loss of our son was not our fault. We were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time—and drank the water.”7
Tom Townsend did not take the news so well. “My wife spent 30 years wondering if she did something wrong,” he told a newspaper reporter based in Montana. “I love the Marine Corps, but I’m suing them for big money. I’m talking Philip Morris dollars.” Townsend proceeded to go after the Marine Corps with a vengeance, conducting a one-man investigation from his home in Idaho. He had been a logistics officer during his two decades as a Marine, so he knew something about how the military provided water on its installations. Townsend gathered enough information about mismanagement of the system at Camp Lejeune to put together a criminal complaint that he sent to the Department of Justice in Washington. Federal prosecutors told him they were actually looking into the case when along came September 11, 2001, and suddenly nearly all the department’s resources were diverted to terrorism investigations. Townsend’s complaint was handed off to the Environmental Protection Agency, and Justice Department attorneys transferred their files to EPA investigator Tyler Amon in North Carolina—with copies to Townsend. “All of a sudden out of the blue came a packet of information and I started piecing it together,” Townsend said years later. “It was like a cathedral where the windows were blown in and I needed to put the pieces of glass back together.” He learned how to use the federal Freedom of Information Act to request more documents and filed hundreds of requests—all handwritten on yellow legal pads—over the next few years.
Jerry Ensminger, now living not far from Lejeune in North Carolina, had also started digging for information about the contamination. His effort began as soon as he heard a TV report about the ATSDR study. The years since his daughter’s death had been very difficult for Ensminger. He and his wife divorced, his small farm had put him deep in debt, and most of all, he was haunted by the mystery of his little girl being taken by a horrific disease. “When we did get divorced, right after Janey’s death, I felt like I was going to come out of my skin,” Ensminger told Daily Beast reporter Lloyd Grove in 2011. “I started going to some of these grief groups. One time I told my story about Janey and about the divorce, that I felt my world was falling apart, I felt like a freak and that something was wrong with me, and when the thing was over with, as I was walking out, the moderator pulled me over to the side and said, ‘Hey, Jerry, I want to show you something.’ She pulled a book out. It was statistics of couples who lose a child through a long-term catastrophic illness, where you watch them go through the hell we watched Janey go through, watch them die a little bit at a time. And it was 87 percent of the couples ended up getting divorced. I said, ‘Wow.’”8
When he found out about Lejeune’s poisoned water, Ensminger never suspected anything sinister; he felt it had to be an innocent but awful mistake. “I wanted to believe the Marine Corps,” he said. “I felt they’d step up to the plate and do the right thing. But the more documents we discovered, the reality came to me that they were covering their ass.” Everyone in the Navy that Ensminger asked about the pollution downplayed its significance, he said. “They said the ATSDR was blowing it out of proportion, the chemicals were trace amounts—there’s no way it could have caused my daughter’s illness.” The more denials he heard, the more motivated Ensminger became to seek the truth. His experience as a drill instructor equipped him perfectly for the job: he was relentless, determined, and very forceful. “They created me,” Ensminger has said many times about the Marine Corps. “And now I’ve turned this weapon on them.”
Ensminger expanded his arsenal in 2002 by connecting with Jeff Byron through the Watersurvivors.com website and by contacting Tom Townsend after reading his comment online about suing the Marine Corps “for big money.” Townsend told Ensminger he had received a packet of documents from the government after filing a criminal complaint, so Ensminger headed to Idaho to meet with Townsend. At his home in Moscow, Townsend pulled out a pile of Lejeune documents—and some disks that he hadn’t even examined yet. When they popped the disks into Townsend’s computer, Ensminger and Townsend realized they had struck gold. “This guy had sent Tom a master file of their document files,” Ensminger said. “It hadn’t been scrubbed.” A full-bore investigation of the Marine Corps by a highly motivated group of former Marines was now under way.
The ATSDR survey that would be “virtually impossible” to complete, as Navy epidemiologist Jeffrey Hyman claimed in 1997, was in fact successfully completed in January 2002 after the agency and its contract employees had contacted the parents of 12,598 children who had been conceived or born at Camp Lejeune between 1968 and 1985. Of those who were reached, 10,040 agreed to participate—just under 80 percent of the total. The parents were all asked a number of questions about the health of their children, including whether they had birth defects or had developed childhood cancer. ATSDR investigators then set about trying to obtain medical records for those cases of serious illnesses identified by parents. By the summer of 2003, the survey findings were confirmed—and the results were stunning.
A total of 103 children with birth defects or childhood cancer were found among the 12,598 Lejeune babies surveyed, the ATSDR’s chief of epidemiology, Wendy Kaye, announced on July 16, 2003. “These include anencephaly, spina bifi
da, cleft lip, cleft palate, childhood leukemia and childhood lymphoma,” she said in a news release. In other words, out of 12,598 babies born at Camp Lejeune when drinking water on the base was known to be contaminated, one out of every 122 had either a serious birth defect or a deadly form of cancer. Jerry Ensminger did his own calculations using government statistics and found that for Lejeune babies, the rate of neural tube defects (spina bifida and anencephaly) was 265 times higher than the national average, and the childhood cancer rate was 15.7 times higher.9
Asked at a congressional hearing in 2007 how many of those children might still be alive, decades after their horrific starts in life, the ATSDR’s Frank Bove said it was hard to say. “The neural tube defects, including in particular anencephaly, they die pretty much right after birth, so those would definitely be dead,” he said. Bove’s colleague at the ATSDR, Tom Sinks, focused on the bright side. “I was just going to add that most of the clefts—cleft palate, cleft lip—would not be fatal,” Sinks said. “We’ve had a tremendous success in treating childhood cancers over the past fifteen to twenty years, so I would think that a significant number of the kids with leukemia would have survived.”10 Of course, that was no consolation to Jerry Ensminger, who was sitting just a few feet away when Sinks made his statement.
