[CPEO-MEF] HEALTH, VOCs: "Camp Lejeune and the U.S. Military's Polluted Legacy"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Camp Lejeune and the U.S. Military's Polluted Legacy

by Alexander Nazaryan
Newsweek Cover Story
July 25, 2014

The old railroad track, now a bike and jogging path, winds through  
the forest that separates Camp Lejeune from Highway 24, which caters  
to the thousands of Marines stationed here with cheap barbershops  
that will trim your high-and-tight for $5, furniture stores for the  
many young families on base, a couple of gun shops, a few bars and  
the requisite jiggle joint. None of this familiarly shabby Americana  
is even remotely visible from the verdant path. Trees crowd the  
sylvan trail like overeager children at a Fourth of July parade,  
their branches poking through the base’s barbed wire fence. You hear  
far more woodpeckers and thrushes than Osprey helicopters. Spend  
enough time on this lush greenway or on the dunes of nearby Onslow  
Beach and you might forget that Camp Lejeune may be, as Dan Rather  
once said, “the worst example of water contamination this country has  
ever seen.”

Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, is a toxic paradox, a  
place where young men and women were poisoned while in the service of  
their nation. They swore to defend this land, and the land made them  
sick. And there are hundreds of Camp Lejeunes across the country,  
military sites contaminated with all manner of pollutants, from  
chemical weapon graveyards to vast groundwater deposits of gasoline.  
Soldiers know they might be felled by a sniper’s bullet in Baghdad or  
a roadside bomb in the gullies of Afghanistan. They might even expect  
it. But waterborne carcinogens are not an enemy whose ambush they  
prepare for.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/25/us-military-supposed-protect- 
countrys-citizens-and-soldiers-not-poison-them-259103.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@lists.cpeo.org
http://lists.cpeo.org/listinfo.cgi/military-cpeo.org