VA acknowledges veterans’ concerns, but continues to deny claims of toxic exposure
Thousands of veterans who trained at Fort McClellan say contamination at the military base caused them to become seriously ill. For more than a decade they’ve demanded the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) acknowledge the source of their sicknesses and approve their exposure-related benefits claims.
The VA recently sat down with a Fort McClellan veteran to actively listen to their allegations for the first time, ending what veterans have called an enduring “systematic lockout.”
As previously reported (“Toxic soldiers,” Street Roots, Dec. 5) veterans in Portland and across the United States claim they suffer from an array of strikingly similar health problems including cancer, brain tumors, reproductive disorders and fibromyalgia, as the result of exposure to contamination during their training at Fort McClellan near Anniston, Ala.
An estimated 600,000 veterans have served at the base since 1935, but VA spokesman Randy Noller says the VA has no way of knowing how many are still alive, nor how many Fort McClellan veterans have filed claims alleging toxic exposure.
The fort closed in 1999 – nine years after the Environmental Protection Agency declared the area a Superfund site (the agency’s designation for the country’s most toxic sites in need of cleanup). In the years that followed, thousands of veterans reported health problems they believe are connected to the contamination.
Partially responsible for contamination in the area is Monsanto, which produced PCBs in nearby Anniston for decades. According to both veterans’ activists and VA officials, Monsanto’s smokestacks were malfunctioning from 1969 to 1971 and PCBs spewed into the air, blanketing the area with toxic particles. Monsanto settled with the residents of Anniston for $700 million in 2003. Veterans say PCBs landed on the base, but VA says they did not, and that if soldiers were affected, it was due to time spent in the adjacent town of Anniston – meaning the VA is not liable.
PCBs were banned in 1979. According to the EPA, they can cause cancer and have adverse effects on the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems.
Chemical weapons training, a leaking landfill, asbestos in the barracks and a radiological and nuclear burial ground also contributed to the base’s highly toxic environment, say veterans.
But Veterans Health Administration officials from the department of Post Deployment Health, Dr. Ralph Erickson and Dr. Terry Walters, say Department of Defense testing has not revealed the presence of toxins outside of safe limits at the fort.
In February, the VA released a statement marking its first step toward acknowledgment of the sick veterans who served at the allegedly chemical-laden fort when it said it would update its website.
Street Roots chronicled the struggles of Portland resident and Fort McClellan veteran Laynie Roland in its initial report. Roland says that since the story was published, the VA has continued to deny her disability benefits claims. She says reports of the VA’s recent statement give her hope.
“We wait, and we hope, and we are grateful for every little bread crumb we are given,” says Roland.
According to the VA, the decision stemmed from a meeting between veteran and activist Sue Frasier and VA officials on Feb. 12.
“As a result of this meeting,” says the statement released by VA spokesperson Noller, “the VA’s Office of Public Health is updating its website to include more information for veterans and service members on potential environmental hazards at Fort McClellan.”
But according to Walters and Erickson, the statement stemming from that meeting means the VA is adding a webpage where relevant information about the fort can be compiled and linked to, and is not an admission that the soldiers were exposed to toxins.
For Frasier, this seemingly small victory comes after a lengthy and frustrating campaign she’s waged since 2002.
For 12 years, she’s boarded a Greyhound bus almost monthly for the overnight, nine-hour ride between her home in Albany, N.Y., and Washington, D.C.
When she took up this cause in her early 50s, she says she never thought it would take so long to get results.
“Back in the early days, I had no money for a hotel, so I’d leave Albany late at night, ride overnight, and then arrive at Union Station at 6 a.m.,” she says. “I’d get off the bus, grab a quick meal, and then change into my business clothes in the bathroom.”
She would then arrive at Capitol Hill by 9 a.m. and spend the day wandering from office to office, talking to members of Congress about her cause and pitching a bill she authored that would form an official health registry for Fort McClellan veterans. That night she’d re-board the bus and head back to Albany.
Frasier turned to Capitol Hill after multiple attempts to meet with the VA between 2003 and 2005 were unsuccessful. “The VA wouldn’t even talk to me on the phone,” she says.
But when Bob McDonald was confirmed as the VA’s new secretary in 2014, Frasier says it was a “light bulb moment.” She knew she had to get down to Washington, D.C., right away to renew her attempts to work with the VA.
At age 64, her efforts with the VA finally paid off. A preliminary meeting in the fall of 2014 paved the way for her to sit down with officials from several different departments within the VA in February.
Two of the VA officials sitting in on the meeting with Frasier had themselves, spent time at Fort McClellan. Their presence, says Frasier, “set it up to be a pivotal turning point.”
Those two veterans were Erickson and Walters. Walters says she can’t say definitively why thousands of veterans are making claims of toxic exposure, but says it might be a matter of looking for something to blame for their health problems.
“As we age, we all get something,” says Walters. “In the case of the Internet age, it’s very easy for things to spread.”
“Even with something like smoking, it took 60 years to conclusively prove that smoking causes cancer, because we have many exposures in our lives, and who knows what causes things. We don’t know the causes of cancers and most illnesses,” she says.
Frasier’s health is similar to that of other Fort McClellan veterans. “I’m almost a textbook case (of toxic exposure),” says Frasier. “Not the most severe, but a textbook case.”
She’s had a hysterectomy and gastrointestinal surgery and suffers from asthma and a debilitating muscular disease. Shorty after she was discharged from the Army, she had surgery to remove ulcerated lesions that covered her face. Despite having cosmetic surgery later to hide the scars, she says she makes for a “convincing visual case” in meetings with officials.
Frasier describes her Albany home as a “national archive” of Fort McClellan contamination documentation. She says part of the battle has been weeding through the misinformation on the Internet. “People sabotage our efforts when they mix things up,” she says. “It takes our credibility to the cleaners.”
Along with other core members of her organization, the Fort McClellan Veterans Stakeholders Group, she’s carefully compiled EPA documentation and test results for different areas of the base. That’s the kind of evidence, she says, the VA needs in order to take Fort McClellan veterans seriously. She says it’s been a challenging to find reliable people to assist in the research and data collection.
“There are aging issues. We’re all so old, and so sick – with cancers, thyroid problems, brain tumors – it really runs the gamut,” she says.
One month prior to Frasier’s landmark meeting with the VA, about a dozen Fort McClellan veterans participated in “Trail of Toxicity March on Washington” to bring further attention to their quest for recognition.
Among them were veterans Jesse Smith and Sal Caiozzo. While in the capitol they met with Rep. David Jolly (D-FL) who sits on the Congressional Budgetary Committee. They wanted to discuss finding money to notify the hundreds of thousands of potentially affected veterans.
Smith and Caiozzo say they walked away from the meeting with the impression it would be better to wait and see if the VA will be able to find the funds. If the VA initiates the process without prompting from Congress, it would be a much quicker means of notifying veterans and getting them benefits, so news of the VA’s intentions of updating its website the following month, they say, was encouraging.
Smith became aware of the Fort McClellan veterans’ plight while living in Alabama. He ran against incumbent Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) for the state’s 3rd congressional district in 2014. Smith says his former political opponent concerns him because Fort McClellan is in his district, but despite mounting evidence, “he’s denying that anything exists.”
Solutia Inc., the company that took over liability from Monsanto for the clean up in Anniston, is among Rogers’ campaign financers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
A former Army investigator with experience in environmental protection, Smith was inspired to assist with the veterans’ campaign. “If we don’t come together as a team, we’re going to die off as individuals an no one will know what happened,” he says.
Despite Rogers’ denial, Fort McClellan veterans have established bipartisan support in the halls of Congress.
According to Walters, the VA can’t set up a health registry without an act of Congress and only has plans for a website update at this time.
“It’s not intended to be a final rendering summary,” says Erickson. He says as new information comes in, they will update the website accordingly. “The goal is to stay correct,” he says, and documentation submitted by Frasier is under review.
During every session of Congress since 2010, Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) has introduced Frasier’s bill, which would create a national health registry for Fort McClellan veterans. The VA could use the registry as a starting point in its investigation into the effects of contamination at the base between 1952 and 1999, so it could later diagnose and treat affected veterans who served there.
In the last session of Congress, the bill garnered the bipartisan support of 84 co-sponsors, including Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) – but it died in committee.
In 2013 the Rhode Island House of Representatives also came out in support of the bill, but issued a resolution requesting it be amended to include all employees and civilians who worked on the base, and all affected biological offspring. Many veterans claim their children suffer from birth defects and other illnesses related to genetic mutations they suffered from toxic exposure. The bill was not amended and includes only veterans filing claims.
Tonko’s spokesperson, Sean Magers, says the congressman is waiting to see if the VA is going to recognize Fort McClellan veteran claims without an act of Congress, but if it doesn’t, he will continue to introduce the bill until it passes.
Frasier says during her meeting with VA officials it was agreed the best first step for the VA to take would be to add a page on its website containing official information about toxic hazards veterans may have been exposed to during training.
An open forum for all the various Fort McClellan activist groups to come together was also discussed as a potential next step. “But that’s still an open question,” says Frasier. She plans to follow up during her next meeting with the VA in May when she submits additional documentation to support veterans claims.
Portland VA spokesperson Dan Herringstad says that locally, the VA will follow whatever directive it receives from national headquarters in regard to Fort McClellan veterans.
