Update on Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base Cold War Era water contamination issue

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Barack Obama signed a bill Monday promising health benefits for Marines and families who were exposed to contaminated water at a North Carolina Marine base for decades.
"I think all Americans feel we have a moral, sacred duty toward our men and women in uniform," Obama said in an Oval Office ceremony before signing the Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act.
"They protect our freedom, and it's our obligation to do right by them. This bill takes another important step in fulfilling that commitment."
The bill passed Congress last week with bipartisan support. Health officials believe as many as 1 million people may have been exposed to tainted groundwater at Camp Lejeune from 1957 to 1987.

Partial Press Release courtesy of AP - Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

U.S. Senate passes bill to provide health care for Camp Lejeune water exposure - Bill now goes to the House as H.R.1627

Heads Up to anyone stationed at Camp Lejeune between 1957-1987 !

Pay attention fellow Proud Cold Warriors ! We need your help !

Read this, then contact your Congressman and tell him/her to vote yes on the upcoming H.R.1627.

(Press release provided by the Senator Burr website)
U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, announced that the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012, a bill that improves services and care for veterans and includes a bill he wrote, the Caring for Camp Lejeune Veterans Act, passed the Senate unanimously.  The Senate bill is known as S. 277.
This legislation will require the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide health care to veterans and their family members who have certain diseases and conditions as a result of exposure to well-water contaminated by human carcinogens at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
“This has been a long time coming, and unfortunately, many who were exposed to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune over the years have died as a result and are not with us to receive the care this bill will provide,” Senator Burr said.  “While I wish we could have accomplished this years ago, we now have the opportunity to do the right thing for the thousands of Navy and Marine veterans and their families who were harmed during their service to our country.  I am encouraged that the House will pass this bill quickly and it will go to the President’s desk for his signature.”   
An estimated 750,000 people may have been exposed to probable and known human carcinogens in the base’s water supply between the 1950s and 1980s. To date, this is the largest recorded environmental incident on a domestic Department of Defense installation.   
Also included in the bill was a proposal Senator Burr authored that will address the backlog of veterans’ benefits claims by authorizing retroactive effective date for awards of disability compensation for applications that are fully-developed at submittal. 

Link over to http://veterans.house.gov/hr1627 for more info on the House version.

Once it passes and reconciled between the two bodies, contact Whitehouse.gov and show your support so the President will sign it into law.

Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Proud Cold Warriors!

Today is certainly a day to be proud as an American.

Just think about what a strong move it was for our forefathers to announce the Declaration of Independence this day 236 years ago. They were ordinary men that had had enough of tyranny. 

This morning I watched a news program where one of the host remembered a 4th of July celebration at his home when he was young. His parents were having a party and the attendees all went outside to see the fireworks display together. As he told the story - the explosions caused a recently returned Vietnam War Veteran to become disturbed through remembering being under artillery fire and had to go back inside. The others left with him in support. A World War II veteran placed his hand on the disturbed Vietnam Veteran's shoulder and informed him that he also just felt the pain of his experience being under mortar fire himself. The commentator went on to state that his mother then thanked them both for their service and said that they would not be able to have the freedoms we have without their sacrifices.

How true is that statement!

Happy Independence Day to you all and thank you to my fellow Proud Cold Warriors for your service.

Through our diligence, sacrifices, and attention to duty we saved the world from nuclear annihilation.

25 Years Ago Today Ronald Reagan's Famous Tear Down This Wall Speech

I am not going to pontificate here. I will let President Reagan's words speak for themselves. There are two links, a short one for the time constrained visitor (3:59, and the full speech (26:42).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Observations of a Lady Cold Warrior

We have a guest blog posting. I love these first hand stories of what really happened in the Cold War at a personal level. As I have stated before, the Cold War was fought by men and women on both sides. Here is one of those stories. Thank you Captain Trouble for agreeing to share your story.

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I was in the US Army Signal Corps from 1979 to 1988 starting with 5 years in Italy and Germany. Like most of the Cold Warriors, the things I did are still classified. The things I was involved in will go unsung and unrecognized, like so many other “Red October” actions. I can only speak in general terms about my work. The level of cooperation we fostered between the US and our NATO partners in the field of communications-electronics was an important element in “bringing the wall down.” My personal contribution to this cooperation was the combination of my specialty as a radio officer and my language ability in French, German, and Italian. When Tito died in Yugoslavia, and the Russian tanks started rolling toward Yugoslavia, my life was a constant round of sleepless nights of frequent alerts and mobilizations. When you got the phone call in the middle of the night, my whole being would tighten up, and I would say to myself, “This is it… the big one… go time!” We’d be in formation in the motor pool, and then we’d get the stand-down call. I’d go home, try to relax, and then I’d get the phone call, and we’d do it again… and again… and again… We knew we would be the first ones to go if it all broke out, and we knew after that it was about a 20-minute lifespan for us, but we still stood the line. We knew the real cost of freedom, because we could look across the border to Yugoslavia and see what happens when you lose it. We saw the children smuggled out of Yugoslavia and left at convents in Italy, because the parents knew their children would have a better life in the west. I transferred to Germany and then President Reagan was elected. Things started getting better. The military started getting the equipment it needed. We started seeing things done to really undermine the Soviet Union – all still classified. So many things that happened under President Reagan to “bring the wall down” are still probably classified. He never got the full credit he deserved for it, and neither will we cold warriors. The important thing is that the wall did come down. The important thing is that there is still freedom in our nation, and there is still hope for freedom for the whole world.

Captain Trouble

Last Memorial Day I gave myself a goal to learn more about the Cold War losses and post an update this year. I researched as time allowed and found that there is no central place where a firm number could be found. I did find one DOD webpage where the confirmed deceased and MIA are listed according to branch of service, rank, etc. with 126 names. This list does not include the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher losses or other so called accidents where loss of life occurred. The CIA has 103 stars on the wall but that is all I could really find. Part of the problem in quantifying such a goal is that the secrecy involved in the operations causes vagueness. I will continue this quest and someday compile a list for publication.


I'd also like to re-post this article from last year because it says it all about how the Cold War losses are viewed.


On Vets Day, thank a Cold Warrior

First Published: Monday, November 10, 2008 by the Annette Sisco blog, nola.com, The Times-Picayune newspaper’s online presence, New Orleans, LA. Provided here with permission from the author Earl Higgins.

On Veterans Day, wreaths honor the dead and speeches honor the living. Gravestones and memorials recall World War II, the Korean Conflict, Vietnam. Members of veterans' groups proudly wear caps that display the names of the wars or battles they survived. Veterans of Desert Storm and the current fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are welcomed and cheered.

It is fitting that all these men and women be recognized for their contributions in defense of their country. They are not, however, the only ones who should be honored.

A curious aspect of the annual ritual of honoring war veterans is that seldom, if ever, do we remember the veterans of the longest war, one that ended in victory for the United States. From 1945 until 1991, the Cold War dominated American military and foreign policy. To oppose the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union and to counter its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the United States needed thousands of men and women in hundreds of places and ships around to world to act as firm obstacles to the spread of Soviet influence and control.

Millions of service members answered the call to duty during that period. They were draftees and volunteers, lifers and those who served one term and returned to civilian life. They were in every branch of the armed forces.

Theirs were not the intense heroics associated with the Battle of Midway, the Normandy landings, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe San or the invasions of Iraq. Rather, they were in places like the Distant Early Warning line in Canada, eyes fixed on radar screens, watching, waiting and hoping that the Soviet Union's bombers would not dare cross the North Pole and start World War III.

They were in tanks overlooking Germany's Fulda Gap, watching, waiting and hoping that the Warsaw Pact's heavy armor would not attempt to overwhelm them and pour into Western Europe.

They were in nuclear bomb-loaded aircraft, watching, waiting and hoping not to use the terrible weapons entrusted to them.

They were in ships, submarines, and aircraft, watching, waiting, and hoping that Admiral Gorshkov's navy would not challenge them into starting a war that could destroy the world.

They were the support forces providing food, laundry, fuel and all the other services necessary to keep the forces ready.

There was no glamour. There were no pictures on the cover of Life magazine.

There was numbing monotony, deep loneliness and homesickness. There were heat and cold, bland food, seasickness and fatigue. Training exercises were repeated until they thought fatigue would make them collapse, and then they did it again. And again.

But they were ready. They were confident. That was why they succeeded -- with victory, not the ambiguity, or worse, that ended other wars.

Because of these soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in the Cold War, the Soviet Union realized the futility of further military adventures. They knew that they could not succeed against people so trained and motivated.

Because of those veterans, the Soviets gave up. They just quit, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, as poet T.S. Eliot wrote: "Not with a bang but a whimper".

Without these veterans' dedication, the "bang" might have been the end of the world. The veterans of the Cold War prevented that from happening. They did not liberate Paris or Baghdad; they liberated the world from fear of nuclear war.

The memorial to them is not on a gravestone or an obelisk in a public square. It is not a name on a veterans' cap.

The memorial is a world in which the threat of nuclear annihilation has been eliminated.

...............

Earl Higgins is a retired commander in the U.S. Navy with 26 combined years of active and reserve service from 1963-89.

Six Seconds to Live - Memorial Day 2012

I felt that I would honor our fallen military members through this story from a previous post that I am compelled to share once again. Below is an excerpt from an American Legion eNewsletter article. 

Thank you to the American Legion eNewsletter and Lt. Gen. John Kelly for allowing me to borrow the article for this post. To read the entire article follow this link -

http://legion.org/magazine/101297/six-seconds-live

Illustration by Matt Hall

"A few minutes later, a large blue truck turned down the alleyway – perhaps 60 to 70 yards in length – and sped its way through the serpentine concrete Jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and detonated, killing them both. Twenty-four brick masonry houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The truck’s engine came to rest 200 yards away, knocking down most of a house down before it stopped. Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was caused by 2,000 pounds of explosive. Because these two young infantrymen didn’t have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi and American brothers in arms.

When I read the situation report a few hours after it happened, I called the regimental commander for details. Something about this struck me as different. We expect Marines, regardless of rank or MOS, to stand their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what the mission takes. But this just seemed different. The regimental commander had just returned from the site, and he agreed, but reported that there were no American witnesses to the event – just Iraqi police. If there was any chance of finding out what actually happened, and then to decorate the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I’d have to do it, because a combat award requires two eyewitnesses, and we figured the bureaucrats back in Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had any chance at all, it had to come under the signature of a general officer.

I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a half-dozen Iraqi police, all of whom told the same story. They all said, “We knew immediately what was going on as soon as the two Marines began firing.”

The Iraqi police related that some of them also fired, and then, to a man, ran for safety just prior to the explosion. All survived. Many were injured, some seriously. One of the Iraqis elaborated, and with tears welling up, said, “They’d run like any normal man would to save his life.”

What he didn’t know until then, and what he learned that very instant, was that Marines are not normal. Choking past the emotion, he said, “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. They saved us all.”

What we didn’t know at the time, and only learned after I submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras recorded some of the attack. It happened exactly as the Iraqis described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated. You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives.

I suppose it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. No time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: “Let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.”

It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. By this time, the truck was halfway through the barriers and gaining speed. Here the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were, some running right past the Marines, who had three seconds left to live.

For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines firing their weapons nonstop.  The truck’s windshield explodes into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tear into the body of the son of a ***** trying to get past them to kill their brothers – American and Iraqi – bedded down in the barracks, totally unaware that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground.

Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could. They had only one second left to live, and I think they knew.

The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty. Those are the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight for you, and as amazing as this selfless act of sacrifice may seem, it is the norm. "