Pay Any Price by James Risen

Author:James Risen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Joint Base Balad became one of the largest American military facilities in the country and one of the busiest airports operated by the U.S. Air Force anywhere in the world. At its peak in the midst of the war, Balad was staffed by a combined total of approximately 36,000 troops and contractors. It was home to F-16 fighters, Predator drones, and other aircraft, as well as the largest U.S. military hospital in Iraq.

Balad also hosted the largest burn pit in Iraq, a 10-acre open-air waste site. Operated by KBR, the Balad pit burned as much as 250 tons of waste a day from 2003 until 2009.

At Balad, KBR burned everything, from plastic bottles and food trash to computers, ammunition, oil, paint, medical waste, solvents, dead animals, batteries, appliances, and reportedly even amputated human body parts—all consumed with heavy doses of jet fuel. Thick plumes of black smoke rose from the pit each day, casting a pall filled with a toxic brew of particulates over the base.

The Balad burn pit was just the largest of hundreds of such pits used at American bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan during the two wars, exposing hundreds of thousands of American troops to their smoke. KBR operated the burn pits for years—despite Pentagon requirements that they were only to be used in short-term, emergency situations. They were supposed to eventually be replaced by incinerators or other more environmentally sound waste management practices, but the Defense Department provided virtually no oversight. Living under the haze of smoke from burn pits became a fact of life for American soldiers.

In 2008, Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, was recruited by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to help run the largest health survey of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan ever conducted. He jumped at the chance to shape what he hoped would be a comprehensive inquiry into the health effects of modern war. In 2009, the VA’s National Health Study for a New Generation of U.S. Veterans was launched with an effort to contact sixty thousand recent veterans. Eventually, more than twenty thousand responded to the survey.

In 2012, while he was reviewing the questions and answers in the data, Coughlin discovered a clear correlation between veterans who said they had been exposed to burn pits in Iraq or Afghanistan and those who said they had recently been to a doctor or medical clinic because of asthma or bronchitis.

The evidence seemed to support a growing belief, among both veterans and health professionals who had studied the issue, that the KBR burn pits had damaged the lungs of American soldiers. Several studies had already revealed that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan had higher rates of asthma and bronchitis than other soldiers who had not served in the war zones, and some health experts saw a link between burn-pit exposure and the higher rates of respiratory diseases. Dr. Anthony Szema, a researcher at Stony Brook University’s medical school, found in one study that 6.

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