You know nothing good is coming when a Navy lawyer responds to a question about the destructive impacts of bombing practice with “It depends what you mean by ‘destroy’…”
It was 2011, and the Navy was holding a public meeting on Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, some 130 miles north of Guam. The meeting was part of an environmental impact statement process for proposed military training and testing around Guam and the Northern Marianas. Many locals were especially concerned about the bombing of Farallon de Medinilla, known as FDM, a two-hundred-acre uninhabited island in the Northern Marianas that is home to numerous species of migratory birds. When the Northern Marianas negotiated with the U.S. government in the 1970s to end its UN trust territory status and become a U.S. commonwealth (like Puerto Rico), part of the deal involved giving the military full use of FDM and two thirds of the island of Tinian. Much like at Puerto Rico’s Vieques, the military then used FDM for years as a live-fire range to test two-thousand-pound bombs, precision-guided munitions, and various other large guns, cannons, mines, and missiles. In 2002, several environmental groups successfully sued to stop the bombing, but the Pentagon found exemptions to environmental regulations and was allowed to resume testing.1
At the meeting on Saipan, a Navy video was playing in a loop behind the environmental lawyer for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. “For decades the Mariana Islands have provided a safe training and testing environment for the military,” a woman’s voice intoned, as images of exotic birds, whales, coral reefs, and the Marianas’ beaches alternated with photos of ships, submarines, fighter jets, troops, and weapons. A sailor in uniform told the camera, “If we can’t train, then we would not be prepared for the real scenario.” The narrator continued, “The military is committed to protecting the islands’ natural and cultural resources and heritage and strives to minimize the effects of its training and testing activities on the environment.”
People inside and outside the military often laud the environmental record of the Pentagon and the armed services. Many point to the protection some large military bases and training ranges provide for wilderness areas and wildlife. With control over tens of millions of acres of land, bases indeed do in some cases (primarily in the contiguous United States) shield the nonhuman environment from the expansion of cities, suburbs, highways, and parking lots.2
Since the George H. W. Bush administration, the Pentagon has also made progress in “greening” itself at home and abroad to lessen the military’s environmental footprint. In 1989, secretary of defense and future vice president Dick Cheney noted the poor environmental conditions on bases and initiated a “Defense and the Environment” initiative to make the Pentagon “the federal leader in agency environmental compliance and protection.”3 By 1995, the Pentagon reported reducing energy usage on bases by an average of 14 percent and fuel usage by 20 percent over levels a decade earlier. In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the Pentagon an award for reducing its pesticide use by 50 percent; two years later, it credited the military with “significant decreases” in greenhouse gas emissions. In 1999, the military reported reducing toxic chemical disposal by 77 percent in five years. During the George W. Bush administration, the Pentagon reported reducing hazardous waste disposal by 68 percent since 1992 and diverting 41 percent of its solid waste to recycling.4
While the downsizing of the military by almost one third during the 1990s contributed to these reductions,5 the Pentagon has shown an unusually high level of environmental awareness compared to most of the U.S. government. Years ago, for example, long before many in the civilian world, the Pentagon identified global warming and climate change as serious threats to national security. The military has made investments in solar power and other alternative energy sources for everything from its bases to the Pentagon itself. According to the Army, the new U.S. base in Vicenza, Italy, was the first base in the world to receive LEED Green Building certification.6 The armed services hold Earth Day events, the Pentagon mentors other federal agencies in environmental management, and even Guantánamo Bay has three wind turbines to produce clean energy.
Regardless of the progress the U.S. military has made in improving its practices, there is no underestimating the profound environmental damage caused by most military bases and the significant risks they pose to humans and the rest of the natural environment. By definition, most bases store large quantities of weapons, explosives, and other inherently dangerous tools of war; nearly all of them contain toxic chemicals and other hazardous waste. Pollution, contamination, and other forms of environmental harm are found at nearly every base.7 Any town, city, or other large concentration of people causes some degree of environmental harm, but bases magnify those effects, both inadvertently—through toxic leaks, accidental ordnance detonation, and other dangerous accidents—and through the intentional discharge of weapons and other environment damage caused during training. Bases storing nuclear weapons are especially dangerous.
Even the greenest military installation has a carbon footprint vastly disproportionate to the number of people living and working on base. Bases are, after all, usually home to large concentrations of extraordinarily fuel-inefficient trucks, tanks, aircraft, and naval vessels. All of these require massive supplies of fuel, oil, lubricants, and other petroleum products for frequent training and exercises, not to mention wartime activities. The military also uses huge amounts of energy to air-condition, heat, and power its bases’ tens of thousands of buildings and structures. The military’s thirst for petroleum is so great that on a worldwide basis, the U.S. armed services consume more oil every day than the entire country of Sweden.8 This means that with the exception of a handful of countries, the U.S. military probably produces more greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution than almost any other organization, corporation, or entity on earth.
WIDESPREAD DAMAGE
Before the introduction of national environmental legislation, the environmental damage caused by military bases was even worse than it is today. At home and abroad, bases regularly dumped toxic substances into rivers and streams, including asbestos, leaded paint, and other hazardous materials. Bases habitually oiled down dirt roads to contain dust.9 Some dumped hazardous waste at sea, including materials associated with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. An Army spokesperson admitted that in waters off eleven states around the country, the Army “secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard gas agent in the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, landmines, and rockets, and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.”10 By 2000, the military estimated that its bases in the United States alone contained 28,538 toxic waste sites, with nearly twenty-seven million acres of contaminated property. The estimated cleanup costs are nearly $50 billion.11
The military offered no count of toxic sites abroad, but there is little reason to believe its record there is any better. In fact, it’s likely that the situation overseas is considerably worse. After all, as we have seen, in the minds of many military leaders, one of the advantages to having bases abroad is the freedom they offer—and part of that freedom is in not being constrained by environmental regulations. Some countries, such as Germany, have strict environmental protection laws and “status of forces” agreements requiring high levels of environmental compliance for U.S. bases. But in most other host nations, environmental protection in local laws and status of forces agreements is often weak or nonexistent. In many cases, the military does not have to meet standards that would be required under U.S. law.12 (This is also sometimes true at domestic bases, as when courts have granted the Pentagon waivers from U.S. environmental laws.)
When environmental regulations do exist abroad, a host nation often has no mechanism for ensuring a base’s compliance. Frequently, the military can return property to a host nation without cleaning up its environmental damage. For example, in Japan, which otherwise has strict environmental laws, the U.S. military has no obligation to remediate environmental damage on its bases, and some of the bases returned to Japan in recent years have featured widespread contamination.13 Globally, the military has generally refused to clean up any environmental damage unless required to do so by a bilateral agreement.14
In Afghanistan and Iraq, bases have regularly used open-air burn pits despite the military’s prohibiting their use outside emergencies. At Camp Leatherneck, one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan, investigators found that solid waste was being burned in open-air pits despite the construction of four incinerators costing $11.5 million.15 For years, military leaders denied any significant risk from the practice of burning waste in outdoor settings. A leaked 2011 Army memo, however, shows the Army warning that breathing air affected by the burning of waste could cause “long-term adverse health conditions” including “reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, atherosclerosis, or other cardiopulmonary diseases.” At Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a base hosting up to forty thousand troops and contractors, hundreds of thousands on and off the base may have been affected by open-air burn pits during the U.S.-led occupation.16
At training ranges, unexploded conventional bombs and shells can be a major problem. In places like Afghanistan, children living near ranges have been maimed and killed by unexploded munitions. If munitions cases crack open or degrade, they can also leak toxins into the soil and groundwater. One study suggests that there may be sixteen thousand U.S. military sites worldwide containing unexploded ordnance. The Pentagon has challenged this precise figure but acknowledged that it could cost $14 billion or even “several times that much” to deal with the problem.17
Leaks in storage tanks and pipelines are also a regular danger. At Diego Garcia, to mention just one example, four separate incidents between 1984 and 1998 spilled more than 1.3 million gallons of jet fuel, polluting soil and groundwater.18 For perspective on just how bad such leaks can get, a jet fuel leak at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, started around 1953 and was only discovered by the Air Force in 1999. The spill grew to an estimated twenty-four million gallons—more than twice the size of the eleven-million-gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill—and is currently threatening Albuquerque’s water supply.19
Bases can also be dangerously loud. Air bases hosting jets and helicopters, and bases where training involves tanks and large artillery, are particularly prone to causing harmful noise pollution. From Ansbach, Germany, to Okinawa and other parts of Japan, noise has been the source of considerable friction with local communities. More than twenty-two thousand residents living around Okinawa’s Kadena Air Force Base are now suing the Japanese government in the third citizens’ suit seeking the reduction of aircraft noise.20 Although some dismiss the effect of persistent exposure to helicopter or jet engine operations as “just noise,” research shows that noise pollution can be a serious public health hazard, damaging both physical and psychological well-being. In Japan, for example, jet noise from U.S. bases has been linked to stress, low educational performance, and poor health outcomes for infants.
In many cases, bases have made efforts to limit noise and its impact on locals. At Ramstein Air Base, there is a permanent “Aircraft Noise Complaint Hot Line.” A Noise Abatement Committee meets twice a year with base commanders. The German government has funded window replacements to better soundproof local homes, and the base generally limits its nighttime flying hours and low-altitude flights and avoids flying over villages. Still, complaints persist. As one local told me, “It goes without saying that an airport in operation per se emits a high noise level.”
Even seemingly quotidian issues like ordinary trash disposal illustrate the damaging environmental effects of overseas military bases. The problem is simple: U.S. bases abroad produce lots and lots of garbage. Local civilians also produce garbage, of course. But whereas the average Okinawan, for instance, produces 590 pounds of trash per year, the average GI in Okinawa produces some 1,500 pounds annually—almost three times as much. At Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan, the average marine produces eight pounds of trash a day, adding up to 2,290 pounds a year.21 And this is actually a low number for troops at war. Across war zones, U.S. troops average nine to twelve pounds of waste per day.22
DUMPING GROUNDS
Unless you personally live near a base that poses a health risk or is known to have caused serious environmental damage, understanding the experience of others in this position can sometimes be challenging. In my case, though, I can simply walk out the door of my office at American University, in Washington, D.C. That’s because my university and the surrounding Spring Valley neighborhood (where I happened to spend part of my childhood) are built atop the remnants of a World War I base that tested and produced chemical weapons.
In its heyday, the American University Experiment Station was the world’s second-largest chemical weapons production facility. Some call it World War I’s Manhattan Project. Almost two thousand chemists, engineers, and technicians tested hundreds of chemical substances there, including arsenic trichloride, ricin, and 498 variations of mustard gas.23 The station created the war’s deadliest chemical weapon—seven times deadlier than mustard gas. Its name was Lewisite, the “dew of death.” A single drop could kill.24 After the war’s end, the then tiny American University gave the Army permission to bury large quantities of munitions, weapons material, and chemicals on its grounds in exchange for leaving some of the base infrastructure for university use.
Decades later, among the children growing up in tree-filled Spring Valley were siblings Nancy and Robert Dudley Jr. Nancy and Robert loved playing in their yard and the nearby woods. They ate almost year-round from their mother’s garden, which was fed by a small creek running through their property.25 But in 1993, local construction workers began stumbling upon buried munitions, some of which were armed and filled with chemicals. Six years later, after the Army Corps of Engineers declared a cleanup complete—and after Nancy and Robert had moved away from Spring Valley—the Army found a 75-millimeter bomb six inches beneath the surface of Nancy and Robert’s former yard. The bomb contained mustard gas. Over time, the Army uncovered 680 more remains linked to chemical weapons where Nancy and Robert once lived, including live explosives and shells that had leaked mustard gas and arsenic. Some of the soil at their former home was literally smoking. The Army made similar discoveries at neighboring homes.26
Nancy and Robert remembered how, as children, they and their four siblings had serious skin problems. Robert’s were so bad at times that he would lie awake scratching all night. “Sometimes I had to sleep with restraints on my arms,” Robert recalled, “to keep me from tearing up my skin.” They started to wonder if there might be a connection between the chemical munitions and the deaths of their parents. Their mother had died in 1984 of colon cancer. Two years later, their father, Robert, died of prostate cancer. Several of their neighbors had contracted cancer as well. Their uncle and aunt, who’d lived just a few houses away, also both died of cancer.27
“That’s the earth where I grew up,” said Nancy, “and I am wondering what may have been in the soil.”
About one hundred yards from my office, the Army Corps has erected a containment tent where it is completely demolishing the house next to the Dudleys’ and removing all the soil down to bedrock.28 The Army hopes to find a major burial pit, a hole dubbed “Hades” in an old photograph of the base. Christine Dieterich lives across the street from the excavation. Like the Dudleys, she’s worried. “How can they expect me to have peace of mind and have my children play in the front yard while they are digging for chemical-warfare agents 20 feet away?”
“I wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat,” Dieterich said. “It frightens the hell out of me. Nobody knows what’s under the ground.”29
Until the Army finds the hole called Hades, the most toxic burial pits found to date remain those at the Dudleys’ old home. Today, it’s the residence of the South Korean ambassador.
There’s an irony to the fact that the remains of a U.S. Army base have contaminated the Korean ambassador’s home. In South Korea itself, American bases have caused widespread harm because of chemical, fuel, and other toxic waste leaks, spills, and, in some cases, deliberate burial. At fourteen of the thirty-four bases the U.S. military recently agreed to return to South Korea, the levels of chemicals linked to cancer in humans exceeded South Korean standards.30 According to the military’s own reports, one base in South Korea has contaminated surrounding soil and groundwater as a result of the haphazard storage and disposal of pesticides, herbicides, solvents, battery acid, and petroleum products.31
In 2011, underground water at Camp Kim in Seoul had almost a thousand times the allowable level of petroleum hydrocarbon, which includes gasoline and other oil by-products.32 What’s more, three veterans say they followed orders in the late 1970s to bury hundreds of leaky barrels of Agent Orange at the base.33 Agent Orange is now known to contain a dioxin that is carcinogenic in humans. Scientists have linked the compound to diseases in troops and locals alike, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, prostate cancer, several respiratory cancers, and some soft tissue sarcomas. “It haunts me,” one of the veterans, Steve House, says. “We basically buried our garbage in their back yard.”34
The South Korean environmentalist Chung In-cheol commented, “If Agent Orange was dumped in 1978, the toxic substance could have contaminated the soil and underground water,” as well as a water source for two major cities in the area. Cancer rates near the base have exceeded the national average by as much as 18.3 percent.35
In another case (dramatized in the 2006 film The Host), a soldier at an Army base in the middle of Seoul dumped twenty gallons of formaldehyde—a chemical that causes cancer in some animals and may cause cancer in humans—into the capital’s Han River. After the incident sparked national outrage, the U.S. ambassador in Seoul took five months to express personal regret about the contamination. The Army announced it would spend $100 million to replace fuel tanks at bases throughout South Korea to avoid leaks and improve its environmental reputation.36
The trail of environmental damage is hardly confined to South Korea. When construction of the base on Diego Garcia started in 1971, Navy Seabees used bulldozers and chains to rip coconut trees from the ground. They blasted the island’s reef with explosives to excavate thousands of tons of coral for building a runway. Diesel fuel sludge began fouling the water.37 Billions of dollars in construction has followed, resulting in considerable environmental damage: additional large-scale blasting and deep dredging of eleven square miles of coral reef; clear-cutting of thousands of trees and other vegetation, including the habitat for threatened wildlife species; radioactive contamination due to leaks from nuclear-propelled ships and submarines; and the likely contamination of soil and groundwater following the widely reported use of Agent Orange to clear jungle foliage.38
Recently, British media revealed that U.S. naval vessels dumped waste and treated human sewage into Diego Garcia’s protected coral lagoon for three decades. Nitrogen and phosphate levels are up to four times normal and may be damaging some of the world’s most pristine coral.39 Meanwhile, during the bombing of the Tora Bora cave complex in Afghanistan in late 2001, a B-1 bomber loaded with ordnance crashed after takeoff from Diego Garcia. The crew ejected, and the pilotless plane ended up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean along with its payload of bombs, which could total more than 85 hundred-pound munitions.40
In Okinawa, on land that was once part of Kadena Air Base, investigations in 2013 and 2014 uncovered more than eighty barrels containing dioxin and other contaminants. The barrels were buried under a soccer field adjacent to two schools. And just as in South Korea, over the decades Okinawa has apparently been polluted by Agent Orange: although the military denies the defoliant was ever present on the island, more than 250 veterans have testified since 2001 to having seen it sprayed, stored, and buried on Okinawa during the Vietnam War.41
When the Navy and Air Force left the Philippines in 1992, they left behind asbestos, unexploded ordnance, heavy metals, leaking fuel tanks, dangerous pesticides, and other hazardous materials.42 The military has admitted to dumping untreated water and sewage at Subic Bay.43 Similarly, when the military left Panama, it left an estimated hundred thousand pieces of unexploded ordnance in the Canal Zone despite being required to remove such ordnance under the Canal Treaty. On San José Island, Panamanians found mustard gas bombs.44
The Navy’s use of Puerto Rico’s islands of Vieques and Culebra as bombing and training ranges has also been an environmental disaster. On Vieques, the Navy dumped almost two million pounds of military waste in mangrove swamps and other sensitive wetland areas. Research has shown elevated levels of cadmium, lead and other heavy metals, mercury, nitrates, uranium, and other toxic chemicals in the food chain and locals’ bodies as well as in the water and soil.45 In 2005, the EPA included Vieques on its National Priorities List of the most hazardous contaminated sites requiring cleanup. The Navy’s estimated total cleanup costs were just $30 million in 2004 but have climbed to around $350 million.46
COLONIAL CONTAMINATION
It is no coincidence that places under colonial or semicolonial rule, such as the Philippines, Panama, Okinawa, and Puerto Rico, have experienced some of the worst environmental damage from U.S. bases. The same disregard for the environment that the military has shown at bases abroad has also been the case on bases in U.S. territories lacking the full protections of the Constitution.
Many in the Northern Marianas and Guam view the environmental damage caused by military bases in recent decades as part of a long history of often unremediated damage dating to World War II. As with Guam, the battle to take Saipan from the Japanese military devastated the island.47 In many cases, munitions, debris, and military equipment remained for years where they lay at the battle’s end. Across Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, unexploded ordnance still lies buried under the soil or exposed to the elements. On the grounds of a recently proposed housing development on Saipan, for example, residents uncovered more than one thousand World War II–era bombs.48 In other cases, the military disposed of hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance locally through detonation, burning, or dumping at sea.49
Since the war, the long-term presence of bases and troops has inflicted even broader damage. When the military began testing nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in 1946, it used Guam to clean naval vessels and other remnants of the tests. (Investigators have also discovered nuclear waste from similar post-test cleaning at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco.) There’s evidence that radioactive materials carried from the Marshalls in the air and rain after nuclear testing there may have directly affected people on Guam.50
On Saipan in the 1960s, U.S. troops dumped used radar equipment containing PCBs in the village of Tanapag. Never informed about the danger, local residents transformed radar parts into boundary markers, windbreaks, rooftop decorations, and even cemetery headstones. After finally telling the government of Saipan about the materials in 1988, the Pentagon had to ship away more than a million tons of contaminated soil for treatment on the mainland. Others have identified at least four dumping sites that still likely contain tons of military debris. Some believe the military stores Agent Orange on Saipan as well.51
On Guam, the military has long stored toxic materials including Agent Orange, mustard gas and other chemical weapons, cleaning fluids, insecticides, and pesticides found to be carcinogenic or otherwise harmful to humans. In 1988, a nuclear submarine discharged radioactive reactor water in the harbor at Naval Base Guam. Navy officials never informed locals, who learned of the accident only after it was reported in a San Diego newspaper.52
A dumpsite near Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base has leached dangerous compounds including antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead, manganese, dioxin, and PCBs. Like Vieques, Andersen is on the EPA’s National Priorities List identifying the worst cases of environmental contamination nationwide.53 During my visit in 2012, workers clearing foliage from around the runway were surprised to stumble upon the buried wreckage of a B-52 bomber; the plane was likely pushed off the runway, hazardous materials and all, with other military debris during the war in Vietnam.
An environmental problem of a different kind is presented by brown tree snakes on Guam, which were accidentally introduced by military cargo flights in the 1950s. The snakes have no natural predators on the island, and they have devastated other animals, driving eight species of birds into extinction. They also cause electrical outages when they slither into power substations. The snakes grow to between three and six feet in length, and today there are an estimated two million of them on Guam. The military is now spending millions of dollars a year on eradication efforts; recently, it has been trying to kill them by airdropping thousands of dead neonatal mice implanted with acetaminophen tablets that are deadly to the snakes.54
In the Northern Marianas, meanwhile, the military recently announced new plans to create additional live-fire military ranges and training areas on the islands of Pagan and Tinian. Unlike Tinian, much of which was paved during World War II, Pagan is a gorgeous and pristine volcanic island with archaeological remains dating back two thousand years. It is home to numerous rare and endangered birds, snails, bats, lizards, crabs, and other species. Michael Hadfield, a biologist who headed a 2010 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey of Pagan, has urged the military not to use the island for target practice as it has done on Farallon de Medinilla and other islands. “There is ample evidence,” Hadfield says, “that when Marines take an island for live-fire training, they ultimately destroy it.”55
As at so many base locations around the world, many on Guam and the Marianas fear that the military’s pollution has affected human health. Research shows that as a group, Chamorros have “significantly higher” cancer rates than other ethnic groups. The incidence of mouth and pharynx, lung and bronchus, cervix, uterus, and liver cancers among Chamorros all exceed U.S. averages.56 And while there has been no comprehensive study definitively establishing a link between illness and base pollution, there are some clear correlations. At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, for instance, where leaks and chemical dumping left toxic materials in the ground and the local water system, a federal study of people who worked and lived on the base has revealed unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects.
Such statistics can only be considered suggestive; even under the most clear-cut and infamous circumstances, such as Love Canal or veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, it is extraordinarily difficult to conclusively connect the disease of any one individual to a specific chemical or contaminant.57 Still, given how many Chamorros can reel off long lists of relatives afflicted by cancer, it is easy to understand why so many are concerned about environmental damage on tropical islands—especially since, with the exception of the military’s presence, these islands have largely remained untouched by industrial pollution.
TIED TO THE LAND
The overrepresentation of U.S. bases in current and former colonies means that the environmental damage caused by bases tends not to be shared equally. Consistently, those most often harmed—such as the Chamorros in the Northern Marianas and Guam—are economically and politically disadvantaged or marginalized groups, indigenous peoples, the poor, and non-Western people of color.58 Bases in Italy, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe have also caused environmental damage, of course, but the military is increasingly interested in moving some of its bases from western Europe to poorer countries in eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. And part of that interest stems from those countries’ limited environmental regulations.
At the Saipan public meeting I attended, a Chamorro couple, Miguel and Janice Mueller, told a military representative, the Air Force’s Mark Petersen, that they were worried about the bombing of Farallon de Medinilla and the military’s other impacts on the land, air, and water of the Marianas. Petersen tried to assure Miguel that the military would be looking at all the impacts of the training “in detail.” But the answer didn’t satisfy. “We’re tied to the ocean and the land,” Miguel told him. But you are connected “only by your job.”
There will be “ample monitoring of water quality,” Petersen said, cutting Miguel off and ending the conversation.
Later, I asked Miguel and Janice if they felt their concerns were heard at the meeting. “No,” Janice replied. To her, it seemed the military was just trying to persuade people to go along with their plans. “I feel like they have an agenda. I honestly feel like they were trying to sell a product,” she said. “It’s a product I don’t want to buy.”
Offering a comparison to a different island in the United States, Janice asked how Manhattanites might feel about having live explosives tested so close to their home. “Maybe they can come back after twenty-five years, and how do they feel when there’s some unexploded ordnance there?” she said. “Tell me. Tell me after twenty-five years and maybe we can sit down and maybe we can share the same lens.
“But at this point, they can’t see what I’m seeing or even have an inch, an inkling of how it feels to live in this remote area, being a United States citizen and part of the American family, and you don’t really matter,” Janice said.
“I think that’s wrong.”