Iraq burn pits killed soldiers

Disease caught in Iraq fatal to vet
BY BOB KALINOWSKI (STAFF WRITER)
Published: May 16, 2012
FORTY FORT - Loved ones of U.S. Army Spc. Dominick J. Liguori say he was fighter, but the 31-year-old could not overcome the lung disease they say he developed while serving in Iraq.

Family and friends gathered Tuesday night to say farewell to the Swoyersville man, who died Friday after a three-year battle with a lung disease called sarcoidosis.

Family members say Spc. Liguori developed the disease from exposure to open-air burn pits while serving in Iraq, and the ailment slowly scarred and destroyed his lungs.

"For whatever reason he go it, he got it," Spc. Liguori's mother, Andrea Kovalik, 50, said outside a viewing and funeral service for her son at the Hugh B. Hughes Funeral Home. "As it heals, it kills you. So his lungs were all tight and scarred."

Respiratory issues affecting military veterans exposed to open-air burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the subject of several recent national news stories.

The Department of Defense maintains that research on the link between lung disease and the burn pits remains inconclusive but nonetheless has shut down all burn pits in Iraq and says it has plans to do so in Afghanistan by the end of the year, according to news reports.

Concerns about a possible link have led to a proposed law in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Open Burn Pit Registry Act. The law would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a registry of veterans who have health problems they believe are related to exposure to open-air burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subcommittee hearings were held on the topic in April.
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Dying Vietnam vet gives away home to veteran without one

Veteran gives home to fellow vet for Christmas

By KATHIE BASSETT
The (Alton) Telegraph

ROSEWOOD HEIGHTS, Ill. — A Vietnam veteran is spending Christmas in the first home he ever has owned, thanks to the generosity of a fellow soldier from that war.

Retired Army Sgt. First Class Frederick Evanik, who is dying from lung cancer, decided to deed his trailer home to another veteran of the conflict, Steve Brown, who had been renting a room in a nearby trailer at Oak Ridge Trailer Park for several years.

Serving in Vietnam from 1968 until 1971, Brown had been a specialist in the Army; he drove fuel trucks. Although Evanik and Brown served in both Vietnam and Germany, they did not meet one another until about four years ago.

"It's amazing that he would do this for me," Brown said. "I was fixing to be in the streets once Gary (Paulding), the owner of the trailer I had been living in, put his up for sale this spring."
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Veteran gives home to fellow vet for Christmas

Iraq veteran dies of cancer after lung transplant from heavy smoker

October 12, 2009

Iraq veteran dies of cancer after lung transplant from heavy smoker
Anil Dawar

An Iraq war veteran died after receiving cancerous lungs from a heavy smoker in a transplant.

Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen’s Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable respiratory condition.

But the organs were from a donor who was believed to have smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day. A tumour was found after the transplant, and its growth was accelerated by the drugs that Mr Millington took to prevent his body rejecting the organs.

Because he was a cancer patient, he was not allowed to receive a further pair of lungs, under hospital rules. The soldier had radiotherapy but died at home in Stoke-on-Trent in February last year.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6870424.ece

Burn Pits problem known and addressed in 2004

Balad
Burn pit at Balad raises health concerns
Troops say chemicals and medical waste burned at base are making them sick, but officials deny risk
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writerPosted : Wednesday Oct 29, 2008 16:31:18 EDT

An open-air “burn pit” at the largest U.S. base in Iraq may have exposed tens of thousands of troops, contractors and Iraqis to cancer-causing dioxins, poisons such as arsenic and carbon monoxide, and hazardous medical waste, documentation gathered by Military Times shows.
The billowing black plume from the burn pit at 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, the central logistics hub for U.S. forces in Iraq, wafts continually over living quarters and the base combat support hospital, sources say.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/10/military_burnpit_102708w/

Djibouti
I was deployed to Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, for six months. During that time, our living units were about 50 yards from a burn pit. On the days after the nights when it was really bad, I couldn’t even taste the food I was eating, and I could still smell it —it was on my clothes and eventually saturated the walls and bed in my living quarters.
The report I was given when I left says there are no ill effects of exposure. It does outline what was burned, which was anything with the exception of ammunition and batteries.
A lot of us were waving the red flag while we were there, and nobody really seemed to care, nor do they now when I bring it up. I simply get the question, “Do you feel sick now?” Last I checked, long-term effects don’t appear a month after you get back.
Senior Airman Thomas McCaulla
Randolph Air Force Base, Texas
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/11/army_burnpit_letters_111708w/

This is a problem not only at Balad but also at Camp Al Taqaddum. During my tour there last year, I was a maintenance chief, and my Marines worked outside 24 hours a day. Most nights there would be soot or ash falling, and we would breathe this stuff in all night. I also recall many nights waking up in my little 6-by-8 plywood hooch thinking it was filled with smoke because the taste and the smell was so thick.
During the day, you could see usually two separate burns going at the same time with plumes of smoke so black we thought that an oil line was set ablaze. Many of us had the “crud” (hacking coughs, a lot of mucus) for most of the deployment, and like most, we had to suck it up and chalk it up to the environment we were in.
Marine Corps staff sergeant, name withheld
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/11/army_burnpit_letters_111708w/

While I was deployed to Camp Bucca, Iraq, in 2006 and 2007, I recall sitting in a tower or doing simple roving patrols around my compound and having to wear a mask to help with breathing. There would be a nasty haze floating over the camp; sometimes there were even reduced visibility warnings.
Senior Airman Veronica Nieto
Minot Air Force Base
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/11/army_burnpit_letters_111708w/

As you can see, the problems with burn pits is not just in Balad but other parts of Iraq and this practice is also being used in Afghanistan.
There are also reports that the jail Saddam was held in was built on a trash dumb. Every time something was done there, the smell was sickening.
This leads me to this warning. Make sure you keep track of everyone you were with and how to get a hold of them years from now. Don't let it turn into what Vietnam veterans faced after Agent Orange came into their lives years after they were in Vietnam.

The most perplexing part of all of this is what was done in Afghanistan in 2004. The following report was written in 2004 when the military was addressing the problems there. The question is, why is it still a problem in Iraq and why aren't the troops taken care of exposed to these dangers?

"One-stop" waste disposal—enhancing force protection in Afghanistan

Engineer: The Professional Bulletin for Army Engineers, Oct-Dec, 2004
By Lieutenant Colonel Garth Anderson and Lieutenant Colonel Whitney Wolf
Sound environmental practices in the theater of operations, principally hazardous and solid waste management, are truly an area of force protection. How much waste can a contingency base camp generate? Seemingly more than it can handle. By Spring 2002, units at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, were faced with a growing human health and environmental threat caused by huge amounts of waste that required collection, management, and disposal. This waste, not just from US forces, included vast amounts of destroyed equipment, trash, and hazardous waste left behind by Taliban forces that were routed away from the airfield.

Uncontrolled Waste Disposal


During the initial stages of base camp development, there were no easy disposal solutions. Most of the land in and around the airfield was potentially laden with mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), which meant waste collection, consolidation, and disposal activities were limited to cleared locations close to soldier living and work areas within the camp. Off-site disposal was not an option since the local population was still unfriendly, and local disposal facilities did not exist. The first disposal area at the airfield consisted of a shallow trash burn pit surrounded by a large junkyard of old Soviet equipment, barrels of hazardous waste, discarded US materiel, trash, and small-caliber ammunition. This disposal site was uncontrolled, and many items--regardless of their potential hazard or reuse value--were thrown into or around the burn pit. The uncontrolled nature of the disposal area created a number of unacceptable conditions:
click link for more about what they did to address the problem.
COPYRIGHT 2004 U.S. Army Maneuver Support Center

While the Indiana National Guard has been reporting problems with their health, it appears this is a much larger problem that will have to be faced. Does the military plan on just waiting for the problems to be problems or will they finally address what they expose the troops to?

KBR, Indiana National Guard and Lung Cancer?

Iraq Veterans Poisoned: War Contractors Knew But Concealed
Dr. Phillip Leveque Salem-News.com
Phillip Leveque has spent his life as a Combat Infantryman, Physician, Pharmacologist and Toxicologist.

(MOLALLA, Ore.) - The Oregonian Newspaper headlined Oregon Troops exposed to toxic chemicals by Julie Sullivan January 9th 2009. She wrote that KBR, a Haliburton company, disregarded and downplayed the extreme danger especially of lung cancer.

The chemical was Hexavalent Chromium Salts best exemplified by various Dichromate salts usually used to remove ALL traces of organic material by chemically burning them from any other material.

This corrosive action also acts on human skin where it causes severe irritation and especially the nose, trachea and lungs where it causes nosebleeds, coughing, pain on breathing and headaches, but especially lung cancer.
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