The Burn Pits by Joseph Hickman

Author:Joseph Hickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2016-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Covering All Angles

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By early winter 2013, I had collected the names and service details from over a thousand armed forces members and contractors who were stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, were exposed to the burn pits, and were experiencing health problems they associated with their exposure. Most of the information I obtained about these people included the dates of their deployments, where they were stationed, and their symptoms. The service members complained of dozens of different symptoms, ranging from severe, chronic nasal congestion to brain cancer. With this information in hand, I began digging deeper, to find out if these symptoms were related to these men and women’s tours of duty.

I began by seeking out Professor Mark Denbeaux, the director of the Seton Hall University Law School’s Center for Policy and Research in New Jersey. The center, which was created in 2004, consists of a team of highly trained law professors, lawyers, and law students who sift through, review, and analyze mountains of documents concerning various government and corporate issues in meticulous detail. The Seton Hall Law School Center covers a broad range of public issues, ranging from human rights violations at Guantánamo Bay to the recent financial meltdown of our economy. The center’s exhaustive research is aimed at uncovering the truths buried within the data they analyze, noting inconsistencies between what government and corporate officials tell the public and what the facts and data actually show. The center’s findings have been widely covered in the media, and their reports have been introduced into the Congressional record by various Senate and House committees and have been cited by the European Parliament.

The center was busy working on several projects, but I thought Professor Denbeaux would still take on the burn pits issue. Denbeaux himself had never been in the military, but his father was an army chaplain in World War II, serving under legendary General George Patton. I think, because of that, Denbeaux holds a special place in his heart for soldiers. As I expected, the professor quickly agreed that the center should take on the burn pits project. Denbeaux and his team of legal experts and students soon began working on a statistical study of the burn pit victims, reviewing where they had been stationed and referencing their medical problems to determine whether there were any anomalous health patterns.

Denbeaux and his team focused on a list of five hundred veterans I randomly picked from my list. I had gathered all the necessary information about these vets, who were from all over the country, including their ailments and their deployment locations. All together, they had been stationed at seventy different military bases throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, at locations where open-air burn pits were used to incinerate waste. All of the veterans were in good health prior to their deployments. All of them were given extensive medical examinations before shipping overseas and all were deemed fit for duty, with no pre-existing conditions. All of them also stated they were never exposed to any toxic airborne substances either before or after their deployment.

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