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Military's Legacy
The Military's toxins are everywhere and they have thoroughly covered
there tracks when it comes to poisoning innocent people who supposedly
serve the purpose of military recruitment, when in fact, they are being
abused, used, and lied to as a norm.
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N.C. base left deadly legacy
22 July 2007 - By JO-ANN MORIARTY - masslive.com
When Hampden resident Sally J. McLaughlin recently
learned of a new government study revealing that water at Camp
Lejeune was toxic as far back as the 1950s, the heartache returned
instantly.
She was reliving the haunting birth and tragic death of her
daughter, Michelle, in Hawaii in 1966 - about two years after she
and her husband, Thomas, a Marine sergeant, had left the North
Carolina military base where they had lived together for more than a
year.
Sally McLaughlin, who had a daughter, Carrie, without complications
during the year she was stationed at Camp Lejeune, anticipated
greeting her second born despite a difficult pregnancy during which
her abdomen was unusually swollen, causing her great discomfort.
Something was all wrong inside the hospital room. Yet the nurses moved
without urgency.
"I remember that everybody had a grim face," McLaughlin said
recently. "I kept saying, 'We are having a baby. Why the grim
faces?' Nobody was rushing. It was all a matter of fact. They (the
nurses) told me to cross my legs because, 'We are waiting for a
doctor.'"
"They had knocked me out," McLaughlin said, referring to the heavy
drugs she was given, "and I remember the doctor waking me and
telling me the baby was dead. I could see her on the table, I could
see her naked body and the doctor asked if I wanted to see her face
and the nurse said, 'No you don't.' I just kept saying; 'She's cold,
why aren't you wrapping her?'"
The baby had anencephaly, a congenital condition where part or all
of the brain is absent.
In June, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
released a study showing three decades of Camp Lejeune residents
likely drank water that was contaminated with either PCE (tetrachloroethylene),
a chemical used in dry cleaning, or TCE (trichloroethylene), a
chemical used for degreasing. The report found that the amount of
toxins found in the water was 40 times higher than allowed by
today's federal standards.
Now the agency is studying whether there is any relationship between
exposure to solvent-laced water and certain kinds of childhood
cancers and birth defects, specifically "the central nervous system
defects known as neural tube defects, i.e. - spina bifida and
anencephaly."
Capt. Amy Malugani, a spokesman for the Marine Corps, said the study
is ongoing and is expected to be released next year.
Sally McLaughlin has her own suspicions, and she believes that the
agency's work might be illuminated by a trip to the Schofield
Barracks Post Cemetery, an Army-owned cemetery in Hawaii. In the
1960s, the island was a jumping-off point for the armed forces
headed to Vietnam and home for military families.
The McLaughlins buried their daughter there in February 1966.
"Tom and I went alone to Schofield Barracks Post Cemetery to have a
funeral. We had to borrow money from the Navy Relief because with
our life insurance, the baby had to survive for five days and we
didn't have the money," McLaughlin said. "We didn't notice anything,
we were so grief-stricken."
She was 22, her husband 24. They didn't have family, except each
other. Sally's mother died when she was 16, the same age she began
dating her future husband. They married when she was 18 years old.
Tom McLaughlin joined the Marines when he was 17 and had spent two
years at Camp Lejeune before they married.
Within months after Michelle McLaughlin's death, Tom McLaughlin was
deployed to Vietnam and served there for 14 months, returning late
in 1967.
When her husband returned from Vietnam, the couple along with their
daughter, Carrie, went together to visit Michelle's gravesite at the
cemetery. It had been 18 months since the death of their baby. This
time, she said, they were more alert and took in the surroundings.
"It wasn't until we went back in 1967, we noticed more rows, but we
didn't make any connection. But that was the first time we noticed
the mass fetal remains graves. There were three. Because we have
never ever seen that before in any cemetery we have been in. We have
never seen it since. Ever."
A cemetery employee confirmed to The Republican there were mass
graves for the cremations of fetal remains. The military offered
cremations to families without charge. "We happened to notice the
section she was in was all babies, born and died within days. A
red flag went up. Why so many babies within a day or two of being
born?"
"In the very back of the cemetery were mass graves, cremations of
fetal remains," Sally McLaughlin said. "It gave the years (from the
1950s through the mid-1960s) and Tom and I said what in the world is
going on? Why so many babies? It bothered me for years, bothered me
terribly."
Something else clawed at her: there was no reference to Michelle's
mother on her tombstone. Sally McLaughlin wanted the military to add
three letters to the grave - "Mrs." - so the tombstone would read:
"Michelle. Daughter of Sgt. and Mrs. Thomas McLaughlin."
"When the military provided the stone, they wouldn't put my name on it,"
she said. The couple left Hawaii and were stationed in San Francisco
for two years during which time they had another daughter, Lisa. The
military was planning to send Thomas McLaughlin back to Vietnam for
a second tour of duty. Instead, with his enlistment completed, he
decided to leave the military after 10 years of service. They moved
to Connecticut but settled in Western Massachusetts, buying their
first house in Springfield in 1971.
About 1985, after corresponding with the cemetery, the military
agreed to add "Mrs." to the tombstone for free, but charged $35 for
engraving "beloved" before Michelle's name. The couple went to
Hawaii in 1986 to visit the baby's grave around the 20th anniversary
of her birth, on Feb. 5.
About the same time, the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune was alerted to
the pollution in 1980, but the contaminated wells were not removed
from service until February 1985.
Testifying before a congressional panel on June 12, Robert C. Dickerson
Jr., commanding general of the Marine Corps, said the water at Camp
Lejeune was found to be contaminated in 1980, but it wasn't until
1984 that the groundwater was determined to be the source of
contamination.
"Ultimately, everyone is here today for the same reason," Dickerson
said. "To determine whether or not our Marines and their families
were harmed in any way by contaminated water."
But U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on
Energy and Commerce, which is overseeing the Camp Lejeune issue,
called the issue a national scandal.
"It is hard to believe that, to this day, former Marines and
their families have not been notified that the water they drank at
Camp Lejeune was carcinogenic - a fact that our government has known
for decades," Dingell said.
"Although the drinking water contamination happened decades ago, the
victims of that contamination continue to suffer both physically and
emotionally," Dingell said. "They suffer the ill effects of exposure
to the toxic water; they suffer watching their children become sick
and die; they suffer waiting for decades for scientific studies; and
they suffer from the apparent penny-pinching and indifference of
their formerly revered commands, the U.S. Marine Corps and
Department of Navy."
McLaughlin agrees with Dingell's assessment, saying, "Nobody called
us. Nobody reached out. We had to find this out."
As she looks back now, she wonders how long those chemicals remained
in her blood and the bloodstreams of thousands of other mothers. She
wonders how long they all carried around the ticking time bomb that
eventually robbed them of their children, robbed her of sweet and
innocent Michelle.
The ongoing federal study is also looking at cases of kidney cancer,
a disease that Thomas McLaughlin was diagnosed with recently.
Surgery at the Lahey Clinic earlier this month saved 95 percent of
his kidney.
"In my head, there are two links," Sally McLaughlin said. "The
anencalphy and the kidney cancer."
Published news stories have reported that the Department of Defense
was ordered to provide bottled water at military bases from Cape Cod
to Hawaii. The DOD failed to offer The Republican an explanation.
"When we went back in 1986, my God, there were rows of infants,"
Sally McLaughlin said. And then her husband, Tom, said something
eerie to her.
Half-jokingly, because the volume of infant graves seem so out of
place, Thomas McLaughlin asked his wife: "My God, what the hell was
in the water?" |
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Reference:
Military Toxics
Project |
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The
The
Labors in the Spirits of
Science
Living on the Lost Planet 
