A Trust Betrayed Read online

  A TRUST

  BETRAYED

  Copyright © 2014 by Mike Magner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Set in 11.5 point Adobe Caslon Pro by The Perseus Books Group

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Magner, Mike.

  A trust betrayed : the untold story of Camp Lejeune and the poisoning of generations of marines and their families / Mike Magner.

  pages cm.

  “A Merloyd Lawrence book.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-306-82258-2 (e-book) 1. Drinking water—Contamination—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 2. Groundwater—Pollution—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 3. Marines—Health and hygiene—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 4. Families of military personnel—Health and hygiene—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 5. Poisoning—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 6. Environmentally induced diseases—North Carolina—Camp Lejeune—History. 7. Camp Lejeune (N.C.)—History. 8. Camp Lejeune (N.C.)—Environmental conditions. I. Title.

  RA592.N8M34 2014

  363.6'10975623—dc23

  2013045263

  Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the victims of military and industrial pollution, especially those exposed during service to their country, only to be treated as collateral damage.

  Contents

  1The Marine Corps Family

  2Lejeune

  3“Baby Heaven”

  4Solvents!

  5Trouble at Tarawa Terrace

  6A Perilous Mess

  7The Struggle for Data

  8Slow Awakening for the Victims

  9EPA vs. DOD

  10The Pentagon Tries for Exemptions

  11Obstructed Justice?

  12“Florida Man Has Brest Cancer”

  13A Stone Wall Crumbles

  14Victims Unite

  15The Way to the Oval Office

  16Changing the Culture

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  1

  THE MARINE CORPS FAMILY

  We take care of our own.

  —MARINE CORPS SLOGAN

  The ambulance from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, raced around the freshly built Capital Beltway, siren screaming and red lights whirling, on the evening of June 26, 1967, carrying Anne Townsend and her gasping three-month-old son to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. As Anne cradled her baby on the back bench, the driver remarked that he and his fellow medic liked to stick to the busy freeways so that, if the aging vehicle broke down—which happened frequently, he said without much alarm—they’d be able to get help fairly quickly. “I prayed that this would not be the night,” Anne would recall later.1

  When the van pulled into the driveway of the world’s most famous military hospital around 10:30 p.m., the attendants rushed the infant inside and told Anne to go directly to the admissions desk. There she was relieved to see, scrawled on the blackboard: “Townsend baby to pediatric ward.” “At least they were expecting us,” she thought. After checking in, Anne followed the green line on the floor to pediatrics as she had been instructed, rushing down the hallways anxious to see how the doctors were treating her son. When she arrived at the ward, she was stunned to find four or five attendants in hospital garb casually sitting around near the entry, a few with their feet propped up on the reception desk. Then she spotted her baby in the arms of a nurse, who looked at her colleagues and said matter-of-factly, “Doesn’t he need oxygen? He’s turning blue.”

  The boy, Christopher Thomas Townsend, was the son of a career Marine who was literally a child of Pearl Harbor. Tom Townsend was ten years old in 1941 when his father, Arthur M. Townsend of Jackson, Michigan, was an officer on the USS St. Louis, a light cruiser based at the headquarters of the Pacific fleet in Hawaii. A 1924 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Arthur Townsend had served for years at the Navy base in San Diego—where Tom was born on New Year’s Day in 1931—before being transferred to Hawaii in 1938. The family—Arthur and his wife, Nietta, along with Tom and his older brother, Jack—lived in the beach community of Kailua, on the north side of the island less than ten miles from Honolulu.

  Life on the island was about as close as a boy could get to paradise. Tom would often wander along the beach scavenging for limpets, a type of sea snail considered a delicacy in the Pacific. An abandoned pool filled by waves from the surf served as his personal swimming hole. Once as he was lounging in the pool and eating limpets, a young woman came along and struck up a conversation. She invited Tom to her home for cake and cookies; the “home” turned out to be a palatial mansion called Shangri La, and his hostess turned out to be Doris Duke, a tobacco-fortune heiress who at the time was known as “the richest girl in the world.”

  The St. Louis went to sea in November 1941—Tom learned later that his father’s ship had been part of a mission to the Dutch East Indies to help the Dutch and British navies coordinate their defenses against Japanese expansion in the region. The cruiser returned to Pearl Harbor on December 4, and two days later, on Saturday night, Arthur Townsend and his wife went to a dance to celebrate their reunion, leaving Tom and his brother at home.

  Tom woke up before the rest of the family the next morning and, as he usually did on Sundays, went outside to find the Advertiser so he could read the funnies. Before he even looked for the newspaper, though, his eyes were diverted toward the southern skies, which were filled with buzzing planes and clouds of smoke. Tom’s neighborhood was on a hill near the Punchbowl Crater (where a military cemetery sits today), and when he moved to a spot at the edge of a cliff, he could see the city of Honolulu and, to the right, behind the hills, the Navy base in Pearl Harbor. “I watched a couple of dog-fights and saw antiaircraft fire,” Townsend later recalled. “Then I saw a big explosion, with thick black smoke and red and yellow flames. I assume that’s when the Arizona got hit.”

  The boy ran to a water tank further up the hill, in a field surrounded by a thick hedge that kept Tom and his friends from running off the edge of a cliff when they played football there. Looking down over the hedge toward the port at Honolulu, he “noticed the Coast Guard ship, the Roger B. Taney, firing at aircraft,” Townsend said. “Then all of a sudden a Zero came from the north, went down in the crater and came up and was machine-gunning the Coast Guard ship in the harbor. It flew right past me maybe fifty feet away. I looked right at the pilot, and he was firing his guns that shoot out of the wing. . . . I knew it was a Zero because I’d read about them, and it had the big red circle on the sides and the wings.”

  Tom starting picking up the brass remains of shell casings that had dropped from the plane. They were hot, so he quickly scooped them into his baseball cap and ran home. His parents were still asleep, so Tom pounded on the door, burst into the bedroom, and dumped the warm metal on his father’s chest, exclaiming,
“Here you go, Dad. The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!” Arthur Townsend shot out of bed and scrambled into his uniform, then went out and sped away in his refurbished 1930 Model-A Ford, headed to his ship.

  For a brief time, the St. Louis was a sitting duck at the dock. Repairs had just been made on one of the ship’s boilers, so a big section of the hull was open to provide access for the work crew. Arthur Townsend was the damage-control officer, a lieutenant colonel at the time, and he immediately took charge of having the ship welded back together. In short order the St. Louis was moving toward the harbor opening, at twice its usual speed, while planes roared overhead, bullets whizzed past, and explosions echoed across the water. It rammed right through a cable it encountered in the harbor and barely skirted the reef where ships must make a hard turn on their way out to sea. A Japanese submarine sent two torpedoes toward the St. Louis, but the bombs struck the reef and exploded away from the ship. Gunners fired a few rounds back at the sub while the cruiser headed out, on its way to rendezvous with the aircraft carriers that were still safely in the Pacific under the command of Admiral William Halsey Jr.

  Nietta Townsend had been the head nurse at Mercy Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, when she met her future husband, so she spent most of December 7 caring for the wounded at the Pearl Harbor hospital. Jack Townsend was in the high-school ROTC program, so he was put on guard duty at one of the water or power facilities on the island while martial law was in effect after the Japanese attack. That meant Tom, twenty-four days shy of his eleventh birthday, was left alone that evening, sitting in a dark house under a mandatory blackout, listening to the reports of war on a San Francisco radio station. Occasionally he would slip outside to listen to the sounds of gunfire that continued through the night, and at one point the lights suddenly went on at the main power station down at Honolulu—Tom thought it was probably an act of sabotage by local Japanese.

  The St. Louis spent a couple of weeks in the Pacific after the war began, transporting troops and briefly assisting in a fight with the Japanese occupying the Aleutian Islands near Alaska. The cruiser was back at Pearl Harbor right before Christmas, just in time for Arthur to help his family get to the mainland along with thousands of other Americans being moved out of harm’s way. (Before he went home, Arthur found his Model A still parked near the dock, riddled with bullets. He vowed revenge against the Japanese for damaging his prized possession, and it was a promise he would keep in the years ahead.)

  On Christmas Eve the Townsends were told they were to report the next morning to the SS Lurline, a luxury liner that had been pressed into service to transport civilians and some of the wounded sailors from Hawaii to San Francisco. “So we packed our bags,” Tom Townsend remembered. “I was given a Christmas present and put it in my suitcase. My brother and I were put in a cabin and my mom was with the nurses. At the pier they were loading the wounded below. I didn’t see them but knew what was going on. My mom had told me it had been horrible—there were so many burned in oil and fuel fires.”

  There were probably a thousand children on the liner with their families. The ship’s huge ballroom was converted into a kind of playground, with dozens of Monopoly games going on all at once. The adults on board were too nervous to be entertained; the ship’s constant zigzagging was a reminder that there were Japanese submarines lurking below the surface that could attack at any moment. The St. Louis had been assigned to be part of the convoy; for Nietta, knowing her husband was on duty nearby helped ease the anxiety.

  The Lurline arrived in San Francisco on the afternoon of December 31. The cold temperature was a shock to Tom, who was still dressed in his Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. A Red Cross volunteer gave him some long pants and a sweater. The Townsends reunited with Arthur, who found his family a room in a hotel on Market Street, not far from the piers. The boys settled in, and while Arthur and Nietta went out to dinner, they locked the door to the room, turned out the lights, and tossed water balloons from the window into the street below, which was filled with revelers for New Year’s Eve.

  Arthur Townsend was granted leave to relocate his family, which wanted to head for warmer climes. They decided to move to Sarasota, Florida, but didn’t stay there long. Arthur went to war in the South Pacific, and Nietta moved to California so she could be with him whenever he returned to the base in San Francisco. Tom and Jack went to Michigan to live with an uncle near Jackson and go to school there. Jack joined the Navy after finishing high school, while Tom decided to move back with his mother and start high school in Berkeley.

  Arthur saw plenty of action during the war in the Pacific, leading a squadron of destroyer-like ships that had been converted to mine-layers and participating in assaults on islands occupied by the Japanese. At Okinawa, nearly all of the squadron’s twelve ships were hit by Kamikaze pilots; some had four or five planes crash into their decks and hulls. By the war’s end, Arthur was unharmed physically, but he was mentally exhausted. Put in charge of cleaning up mines, he forced some of the captured members of the Imperial Japanese Navy to do the job, saying he wouldn’t put any more American lives at risk. He positioned his ship nearby with its guns pointed at the Japanese and told them if they did anything amiss he would blow them out of the water. Because his actions were considered too harsh, Arthur Townsend was told he could not attend the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945; instead, he would have to return immediately to the United States. He ended up spending a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital suffering from combat fatigue. After his release in 1946, he eventually retired. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service during the war.

  Tom Townsend graduated from high school in 1948 and immediately took the entrance exam for the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He didn’t do well enough for admission, so he decided to enlist in the US Marine Corps. His first stop was Parris Island in South Carolina for boot camp. Afterward, he landed an appointment at a Naval Academy prep school in Rhode Island, and in 1950, he ended up getting into Annapolis after all. “That was a hellish year,” Townsend said. “I was not a good midshipman.” He was now older than most of the students in the class above him, but that didn’t stop them from treating him with the usual disdain for a plebe—it probably made things worse. “I didn’t do well being harassed by the young punks,” Townsend said. “I had all kinds of problems. . . . I was belligerent.” His grades suffered, too, and by the end of the year Townsend was told he could either repeat as a freshman or leave the academy. After a trip to Europe to reflect on his life, Townsend decided to return to Jackson and use the academic credits he had earned to try to obtain a degree at the University of Michigan. Then he would return to the Marines.

  Townsend carried a heavy load of classes at Michigan and also worked as a waiter and cleanup man at a fraternity house in return for his room and board. His schedule left little time for anything but studying and working. In his senior year in 1954, he had a blind date with a student at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University). Anne Taubitz had grown up in Greenbush on the shore of Lake Huron. Her parents ran a country store in the tiny crossroads town, and when Anne took Tom up to meet them, her father, a former Marine, instantly welcomed him into the family. Tom was going back into the Corps right after graduation from Michigan, this time commissioned as a second lieutenant. He went for his six months of training at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, and then he returned to Greenbush on December 28, 1954, to marry Anne.

  Townsend’s first assignment in the Corps was the artillery regiment of the 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in January 1955. One of five lieutenants in the battery, he was designated as a forward observer on the firing range. During his first day at the base, Townsend was getting a rundown from the first sergeant at the range station when he heard some loud banging from the locker area. The sergeant scampered over and opened one of the lockers to reveal a young Marine stuffed inside. The grunt was ordered to keep quiet, the door was sl
ammed shut again, and the unofficial punishment was continued for whatever breach had been committed—Townsend didn’t ask for details. He eventually became good friends with the burly sergeant, often inviting him to home-cooked meals that Anne would prepare at their small apartment in the Tarawa Terrace housing complex on the base.

  The year at Camp Lejeune flew by, especially after Anne became pregnant with their first child, Mark, who was born in late 1955. The following year Townsend was sent to Parris Island, where he was assigned to the rifle range, a post he held for more than two years. Then he received a dream transfer, to the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, in July 1958. For Tom it was like coming home; for Anne it was a chance to enjoy a relaxed family life in a heavenly beach community. She also was schooled by her husband in “the social protocol of rank,” she would write later, “and adapted to wearing gloves while balancing a drink, nibbling an hors d’oeuvre and clutching an evening bag—while being mindful of the cocktail hat rule (is the party before 6 PM or after?).”

  After three happy years in Hawaii, where Tom was an executive officer in the artillery unit of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines, the Townsends moved to the Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the center of the US military’s nuclear weapons operations. Tom was a training officer and one of the few field Marines at the joint facilities shared with the Army and Air Force. For entertainment in the desert wasteland, Townsend would sometimes dress as a commando and harass the Army units training in the sands, calling in his friend, who was the only Marine pilot at the base, to buzz the troops, which were amassed in large units with dozens of heavy weapons. Once when he was out scouting for action, Townsend strayed near the fence surrounding the nuclear weapons site at Kirkland Air Force Base and was immediately seized by Air Force guards. With no identification, wearing camouflage fatigues and black paint on his face, Townsend was seen as a serious threat, and the guards roughed him up against the fence while demanding an explanation of what he was doing. It was only after Townsend convinced them to call his commanding officer that the guards let him go. His days as a faux commando ended.