CHAPTER 6

Dirty Water

… the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

GENESIS 1:2

A CAREER IN THE MILITARY COMES WITH CERTAIN DANGERS. ANYONE who’s ever worn a uniform understands that. But the water at a U.S. military base on American soil? No, that should not be one of the deadlier threats.

Too bad no one warned Sgt. David Metzler.

Even before he and I talked, I knew I was going to like him. “Not as lean—not as mean—still a Marine,” he wrote in the subject line of his first email to me. This was a guy who stood for something and could also laugh at himself.

“I’ve lost my inner-ear balance and most of my hearing,” the former Marine Corps sergeant told me the first time we spoke. “I have macular degeneration. So I don’t see too well. All my teeth have been pulled out. I have total nerve damage in both knees, lower legs, ankles, and feet,” which makes it impossible for him to walk. “I was prescribed Vicodin twenty-five years ago, and Oxycodone during the last fifteen years. The local doctors treat me like a street junkie, although I still take the original dosage, and I live with a lot of pain. I also wear an oxygen unit twenty-four-seven due to lung scarring.”

“All that,” he added, “because of the water at Camp Lejeune. If it weren’t for my daughter and my service dog, I don’t know what I would do.”

David Metzler wasn’t reaching for sympathy. He was just getting me up to speed on where things stood with him. Since leaving the Marine Corps honorably in 1959, he’d been on a long and frustrating journey through the veterans’ health-care system, and I was shaking my head at nearly every word.

A retired auto worker and always a 6^th Battalion Marine, he could barely see or hear. His walking days were mostly behind him. He’d found himself largely confined to a wheelchair. But he hadn’t lost his gung-ho spirit or the willpower that got him through the day. His daughter, Patty, a registered nurse-practitioner, had been hugely helpful, as had his constantly alert service dog, a twelve-year-old Scottish terrier named Shannon.

“I am blessed to have them both,” he told me.

David’s avalanche of ailments, it turned out, weren’t the result of bombs or bullets. He spent most of his four-year tour at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with a shorter stint at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, nowhere near a battle zone. America wasn’t even at war at the time. His main assignment was manning Lejeune’s Wallace Creek Boat House, where his duties included signing the watercraft in and out and washing them down with high-pressure hoses. I remembered as a young soldier being assigned to wash down seventy-ton armored vehicles that had been out on training exercises. They were caked with dirt, sand, mud, grease, and grime. We used high-pressure hoses and other equipment similar to those used by boat washers at Camp Lejeune. We had tightly fitting rain gear, and, when the day was done, we were still dripping wet from head to toe.

I never considered equipment washing hazardous duty. Neither did David Metzler. But there was a problem with the water at Camp Lejeune.

A major problem.

And it put hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million U.S. service members and their families, at terrible risk.

I had heard talk about the toxic water at Camp Lejeune. But until I met David, Patty, and Shannon, I had no idea how much human devastation that poisoned water had caused or how poorly our government has responded to the crisis. For a thirty-year period from 1957 to 1987, a variety of solvents and other industrial chemicals were dumped or buried near the wells feeding Camp Lejeune’s water supply. These chemicals, more than seventy in all, included some very nasty stuff: a degreaser called trichloroethylene, a dry-cleaning solvent called perchloroethylene, and a highly flammable, colorless liquid called benzene. Believe me, you do not want to drink, bathe in, brush your teeth with, or be anywhere near water as polluted as that. For all those years and for decades after, no one paid much attention until doctors started noticing unexpectedly high rates of cancer, leukemia, miscarriages, and birth defects among people who’d been stationed there—or had lived or worked nearby. At first, government officials reacted the way government officials often do, by ignoring, denying, obstructing, and downplaying the problem. But in 2007, a retired master sergeant named Jerry Ensminger, whose nine-year-old daughter, Janey, had died of cancer in 1985, found an official 1981 document describing a radioactive dump site near a Lejeune rifle range. Finally, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs were pressured into action. On March 8, 2010, Paul Buckley of Hanover, Massachusetts, who’d been stationed at Camp Lejeune, received a 100 percent service-connected disability for multiple myeloma. It was the first time Washington admitted a link to toxic water exposure at Camp Lejeune. In the months and years that followed, claims poured in, including one from an increasingly disabled former sergeant by the name of David Metzler.

Congress finally took a vote in 2012, and President Barack Obama signed the Janey Ensminger Act, named in honor of the master sergeant’s daughter, authorizing full medical care for some military personnel who had been at Camp Lejeune between 1957 and 1987 and developed health problems caused by the water contamination.

This was certainly a step in the right direction—but just a baby step. The new law applied to Camp Lejeune personnel suffering from only fifteen specific ailments including leukemia, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndromes, renal toxicity, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and cancer of the esophagus, lung, breast, bladder, or kidney. Unfortunately for Sgt. Metzler, and for hundreds of thousands of others who had served at Camp Lejeune, his many medical conditions were nowhere on the list.

What has happened and is continuing to happen to these men and women who served at Camp Lejeune is an enormous blight of national significance. Yet the situation has never been elevated in the national consciousness. It is one of a startlingly large number of issues faced by our nation’s warriors that fall into the category I refer to as “the War after the War.” Ironically, that’s often the toughest war of all.

Tuesday and I have been inspired by the many thousands of people who’ve contacted us about their ongoing battles, as well as our own experiences, to join in and sometimes lead these campaigns. Of course, the sheer number of issues and sufferers means no one person can do it alone. The good news is we have some phenomenal allies on our side, men and women who care deeply and are armed with a real fighting spirit. This is often true of those who are or have been in the military. They have the training, the temperament, and the experience that leaves them ready to take on life-or-death challenges, and they hate nothing more than surrendering.

As with many people in his situation, David’s medical issues had pushed him to the edge of bankruptcy. “My wife, Jane, and I are deep in medical debt,” he told me. “Two mortgages and fifty-five thousand in credit cards over the passing years. Our oldest daughter is taking over our debts, our home, furnishings, and a small storage business we opened after my retirement to meet rising costs.”

The first thing I wanted to help David with was something very close to my heart. He and his wife had decided to move to a furnished apartment in Punta Gorda on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where life would be less expensive and the winters less harsh. But almost immediately the move had gotten complicated. The manager of the rental condo was objecting to his service dog. “Although we mailed them all of the necessary and notarized papers about a service dog,” he told me soon after he arrived in Florida, “they are insisting I also sign documents stating I do not own a dog, which I have refused to do.”

He couldn’t imagine living without Shannon, and he certainly didn’t want to lie.

This made my blood boil. Tuesday is my service dog and my family and no one had better try to test my loyalty. I knew David felt the same way about his service dog. And he needed Shannon, who listens for any adverse changes in David’s breathing during the night and quickly nuzzles him whenever the oxygen unit stops or the hose moves from his nose.

I reminded David that refusing to rent to someone because of a service dog was a clear violation of the Fair Housing Act. There was no way a major complex in Florida would get away with banning service dogs. I was confident that, after receiving a strongly worded letter, the management company would fold immediately.

Done and done.

The United States military was a tougher fight.

David put me in touch with his daughter, Patty, and I learned more about his terrible journey through this health-care nightmare. Within a year of being honorably discharged in April 1959, he began to develop neurological problems. In 1963, he was first diagnosed with inner-ear nerve damage. The damage caused chronic dizziness, falling, and hearing loss. By the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, he developed degenerative eye disease and muscle atrophy with progressive loss of function in his lower extremities. His muscles and nerve cells degenerated. “Bilateral lower-extremity muscular myopathy” and “neuropathy,” the doctors called it. David’s growing list of unexplained ailments included Ménière’s disease, sensorineural hearing loss, depression, congestive heart failure, and bilateral macular degeneration. He’d been fine before he reached Camp Lejeune and a medical mess thereafter. For many years, he had no idea what was causing any of this. Despite countless tests and medical exams, specialists at the Cleveland Clinic and the Ohio State University couldn’t figure it out either.

With her nursing background, Patty had her own ideas. With a push from her, doctors concluded in May of 2000 that his long-term neurological decline was related to mitochondrial abnormalities, just the kind of thing that repeated exposure to toxic water could cause. But this was 2000, a full eight years before anyone was paying attention to the water at Camp Lejeune. The VA was still in deny-and-minimize mode, nearly two decades after discovering the toxic-water problem. So David got no help. It wasn’t until May of 2013, after he heard about the Janey Ensminger Act, that David applied to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for compensation for his extensive medical care. Sadly, in June of 2014 he got a rote denial. The VA ruled that his medical conditions were not service-connected since none of his many ailments were on the limited list of just fifteen linked conditions. In desperation, Patty sent a letter to USMC headquarters, asking for help. She got the coldest of brush-offs.

“It would be inappropriate for us to interfere or comment on the VA’s independent decision-making responsibilities related to health care,” A. R. Wright, Chief of Staff, USMC Installation Command, responded.

The few, the proud, the forgotten.

Sadly, David’s case is still stuck in the purgatory that is the Veterans Affairs appeals system. But we refuse to give up. On a visit to Ohio, Patty showed me piles of missing documents she’s been gathering. Together, she and I are reanalyzing old reports. And we are bringing in top medical experts to assess David’s case. They include Dr. Zarife Sahenk, one of the nation’s top neuromuscular pathologists whose specialties include genetic testing and nerve and muscle biopsies. In February of 2016, the doctor saw David and wrote in his report words that give us all big hope: “the possibility of exposure to TCE and PCE may have contributed to his disease process is a valid one and cannot be dismissed.”

Just like David and Patty have been saying all along.

That doesn’t settle things. But it’s another step closer to getting David the medical help he deserves for putting his flesh on the line. And with perseverance, there is much more to come.

We have gotten the media involved, often a good way to force the bureaucracy to pay attention. That’s often an important part of the dynamic advocacy strategies that Tuesday and I develop with people. After David and Jane moved to the Tampa area, a journalist at the Tampa Tribune put together a great piece about local Camp Lejeune veterans in that area who had ailments like David Metzler’s. As I did with Amee Gilbert and her son Cole at Fort Carson, we worked with Patty to write a powerful op-ed piece, hers published in the Tampa Bay Times. It recounted her father’s long and difficult fight. “At 78 years old,” she wrote, “my father can hardly walk, see, or hear. He suffers from chronic pain. He has a history of depression. In one desperate moment, he attempted suicide to try to end his suffering. No human being, especially a veteran, should ever have to endure this.”

This wasn’t easy to write, of course. But Patty believed it was important that people knew.

“The Marine Corps motto, ‘Semper Fidelis,’ means ‘Always Faithful,’” she wrote. “However, the USMC has failed to uphold this principle. For decades, our military has proclaimed, ‘No one will be left behind, no matter the cost.’ Americans enlist believing that they will be protected under this admirable principle. It breaks my heart knowing they lay their lives on the line for each other and their country yet, once they complete their duty, they become ‘fallen comrades’ left alone on ‘the battlefield.’”

Shortly after the piece was published, a television reporter in Youngstown, Ohio, interviewed Patty for a segment about the fight. Her story and that of her father are certainly of local and national importance.

Patty, Tuesday, and I vow not to stop until we get David the justice he deserves. I’ve spent many hours researching everything I could find about toxic water in Camp Lejeune, then asking myself, “Okay, where can Patty and I and Tuesday gain traction? Who is the Marine Corps general ultimately responsible for Camp Lejeune? Who in Congress would be interested in this? Who do we lean on at the VA?” All of this takes dogged advocacy. It takes a thick skin and a refusal to fold even when doors slam and requests are repeatedly declined.

We keep making progress, but we don’t have a second to waste. Mortality is a clock that ticks loudly for David Metzler. The idea of waiting another couple of years for the VA to decide his appeal is almost unthinkable. What a hollow victory it would be if we receive it after he was gone.