They protested the denial of care to veterans and talked about the rates of suicide, incarceration and invisible wounds such as post-traumatic stress disorder, affecting more than 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
According to investigators, hundreds of thousands of Marines and their families living on base were exposed to well water contaminated by cleaning solvents between 1953 and 1987. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act, part of the PACT Act signed this month, lets military families who lived on base during that time sue for relief.
The measure — signed into law on Aug. 10 — includes almost $300 billion in new financial benefits for veterans suffering from illnesses caused by burn pit smoke in Iraq and Afghanistan, Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam, and several other military toxic exposure events.
Partain said he and his friend, Jerry Ensminger, an ex-Marine whose 9-year-old daughter died of leukemia in 1985 while the family lived at Camp Lejeune, "have fought tooth and nail" on the issue for 15 and 25-plus years, respectively.
So I started digging into the regulations and reports. It was all online. There was the Army Regulation saying “no burn pits.” It was pretty easy to map out the story. You’re not allowed to burn a fire in your backyard in the United States, right? This is 240 tons and an open pit. So it really wasn’t that hard of a story to report out. But no one else had done it.