Occidental Mindoro, Philippines—The below opinion piece pertains to the ongoing struggle for justice among Americans affected by the decades of deadly water contamination at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The author is Andrew Straw, the son of an Active Duty veteran, an Illinois UOCAVA voter living south of Manila, the Philippines, and Member of the Democrats Abroad Global Veterans and Military Families (VMF) Caucus.
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As a Camp Lejeune victim and as a federal attorney, I can confirm the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022 (Section 804 of the PACT Act), ironically, has still not yielded justice to all those negatively affected by Camp Lejeune, such as myself. My family, like so many others, were directly exposed to drinking water toxins at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, and have been waiting decades for owed compensation and health care. The poisons were in the base drinking water from 1953 to 1987.
Congress and the federal courts made it easy for veterans serving at Camp Lejeune to get justice, but they made it impossible for family members also located there to get the simple justice that all victims need. Everyone exposed there has needed health care that covers everything for the rest of their lives. Lawmakers should understand this is so basic and the number one remedy. It should already be in place, but it isn’t yet.
Why? Because even when Camp Lejeune water contaminants trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride, and benzene are not shown to cause a disease in the first place, they can make an established health condition worse. It would take decades of additional health studies to show how they make each underlying condition worse. The victims have already waited too long. The time for such studies is long past. We know the immune system is affected by these toxins just like the nervous system and every part of the body was exposed too. Thus, any condition could be made worse.
Justice would require full health coverage for anyone exposed, for life. Certainly, this includes anyone born there during the affected years of contamination, whether their military parent slept on or off base at night.
The Camp Lejeune Family Member Program, authorized by Congress in 2012, left a gaping hole. Military parents are covered even when sleeping off base, but their children and spouses who used the base during the day are not. That’s just cruel.
If someone was born at the Naval Hospital on Camp Lejeune property, like me, the bottom line is that they should have been included in full health care coverage. The Federal Circuit agreed with the narrow views of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) and excluded the family members from this health care if they slept off base in neighboring Jacksonville at night. I know. I was the test case in federal court. I was denied, personally. I was born there and exposed for 19 months from 1968-1970. As a result of the poisoning, I was injured with a cardiac birth defect and nervous system injuries, among other things. But I was “not enough” of a family member to get the health care even when my father was a Marine stationed there for 19 months preparing for his Vietnam duty.
The water contamination at Camp Lejeune killed my mother. She had a deadly form of breast cancer with no family history of breast cancer. She died in 1997, my second year of law school.
There are currently 408,000 claims under Camp LeJeune Justice Act of 2022. There are thousands of lawsuits and one consolidated case to do bellwether trials and get this matter resolved by the one federal district court allowed to manage this: Eastern District of North Carolina. That court only has four judges, all appointed by Republican presidents: Reagan, Bush, and Trump.
After 69 years of waiting for a new law to grant justice after the poisoning started in 1953, we victims have waited another 3 years while the government has quibbled over practically every aspect of trial, successfully taking away a jury trial right that was mentioned in the statute. DOJ achieved delay after delay so the government is treated “fairly.” Can you imagine? The federal government has argued for “fairness” when it permanently damaged the health of 408,000 victims, including those who already passed like my mother.
We the victims are not at fault for our injuries. From our perspective, the government does not deserve even more due process to delay this injustice further and hope find some new loophole to avoid paying the compensation owed to victims and like what happened with the health care.
Now, the federal court in North Carolina has appointed two attorneys as settlement masters to create a global settlement. They are trying to put something in place by December 2025, but to be frank, it is difficult to trust them and the “fairness” they’ll ultimately come up with.
As usual, there is a problem – a bona fide conflict of interest. One settlement master was a Navy officer who advised the base commander at Camp Lejeune. The other one was a senior DOJ attorney with many DOJ attorneys under him.
It is basic ethics in alternative dispute resolution not to assign the attorneys for one side only as the settlement masters. Those attorneys for the government have ongoing attorney-client obligations that make their being neutral impossible.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could be asked to create a fair system of payment and it could generated in minutes, not years. If the government is serious about wanting to help both veterans and their family members, every disease of a CLJA claimant should be compensated. And especially every death. The only thing AI would need to do is take an insurance database of wrongful death verdicts and disease compensation and offer every victim the true value of their injuries and deaths as juries have determined elsewhere. Only the high end of verdicts should be considered. Either that or what the victim put on the CLJA claim form, at the victim’s discretion.
I’ve seen a wrongful death compensatory damages verdict in the billions before. With health care costs soaring year after year, the government owes Camp Lejeune victims – both veterans and their family members. No illness claimant should get less than $1 million after waiting decades for the lies and avoidances to be cleared away. No death should get less than $60 million. It’s what a life is worth.
The lack of justice resulted in every sort of misfortune downstream from the poisoning: divorces, parent and child alienations, bankruptcies, disabilities, humiliation, deaths, and just being disabled and physically located in a country where disability is the least protected category of civil rights.
I have experienced nearly all of these misfortunes and my law career was laid on the chopping block. The military sacrificed my father - a sacrifice not unlike Abraham and Isaac, but the Marine Corps didn’t send an angel to stop my Marine father’s sacrifice.
As part of the estimated 1 million victims of Camp Lejeune’s water contamination, our damages are likely in the trillions of dollars because we were poisoned and left to deal with it alone. It is not an exaggeration to say we were lied to and that the poisons were minimized, so our deaths and suffering were not compensated in a full and timely way.
72 years of this–56.5 years for me and my family–is enough.
This is the worst public water poisoning disaster in U.S. history and it happened on a U.S. military base with oversight authority by Congress. There is no reason to drag it out; we don’t need more bad faith and more of the same government dishonesty that let this travesty happen in the first place.
Unfortunately, I am also a 9/11 victim but the DOJ’s unethical VCF settlement master falsely denied me $500,000 in damage from those toxins, saying I wasn’t there in 2001 despite providing evidence I was indeed there. The government could not disprove my evidence, the only evidence was what I provided on the record. This was DOJ’s Civil Division again, obstructing my justice to weaken me as a Camp Lejeune advocate and victim. Within our mammoth-sized federal government, there are, unfortunately, some dishonest attorneys. Immediately replacing them would help both 9/11 victims and Camp Lejeune victims, and I happen to be both.
My lack of justice has left me living below the U.S. poverty line in a jungle hut in the Philippines with no health care. My only income is a below average SSDI disability pension. I have been discriminated against at every level of government. I wait for justice like everyone else, every day of delay causing me and all the victims new and more severe injuries.
To be clear, justice isn’t complicated—at least not on this issue. The government needs to pay what is owed in damages and provide full health care. Thousands of thousands of Americans are now diagnosed with having a serious health condition through no fault of their own, and countless veterans and military family members have already died. Providing justice is important because it would right a decades-old wrong so victims can have a chance to start over and lift their families out of this poverty and disability hole. The third-class status of disabled Americans is not in a foreign country but rather within the United States. The Supreme Court admitted that state court discrimination against Americans with disabilities has existed back to before the country’s Founding.
If the courts do not provide the health care and compensation we deserve, then Congress must immediately pass legislation to expand the PACT Act’s CLJA provision to include family members of veterans stationed at Camp Lejeune but having had slept off-base. Because of this loophole in the law, DOJ feels the status quo is “fair,” but we’re still living lives of severe deficit because the federal government took without giving back. No more victim blaming, no more delays.
Andrew U.D. Straw
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U.S. citizens living abroad, both civilian and military, are highly encouraged to check your voter registration status and request your ballot for any upcoming elections in your home voting state that you are eligible to vote in.
The VMF Caucus, proudly consisting of veterans, military family members, and strong allies of veterans and military family causes, has a membership of approximately 1,300 members located in dozens of countries.
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