DC Bureau

Indiana National Gaurdsmen. Photo courtesy of Russell Kimberling

Military Exposure Guidelines permissible exposure limit for chromium: 5,700 parts per million.

Chromium soil concentrations found by KBR samples at Qarmat Ali on August 7, 2003: 16,459 parts per million

Like KBR, the military failed to look after its own at Qarmat Ali.

“Unfortunately,” Sgt. Russell Powell said in Congressional testimony, “many of the soldiers who served at Qarmat Ali are paying the consequences for the Army’s failure to warn and protect the troops.”

At the treatment plant, as soldiers expressed concerns about sodium dichromate, the military brass remained taciturn and downplayed the danger posed by the chemical. Once the toxic conditions at Qarmat Ali were revealed, the Army relied on a questionable and surreptitiously administered medical test to fend off claims of a hazard, and used the results to deny health care for exposed veterans.

“Perhaps the Defense Department has been eager to downplay concerns about this problem because it knows that it was itself partly responsible for causing it,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) during an August Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) hearing on Qarmat Ali.

The Pentagon has a history of complicity in KBR wrongdoing. In some instances it has exercised lax oversight, as in the electrocution death of a Green Beret that resulted from KBR’s faulty electrical wiring on U.S. bases. In others, it is accused of blatant cover-ups, like the case in which a Texas woman was gang-raped by her KBR co-workers in Baghdad. Testifying before Senate Democrats in May, Charles Smith, a former senior Defense official, said that he was forced out of his job in 2004 for refusing to approve $1 billion in suspicious charges by KBR. “The Army was aware of KBR’s poor performance in Iraq. There have been numerous government inspections and reports,” he said. “In 31 years of doing this work, I have never seen anything like the way KBR’s unsupported charges were handled by the Department of Defense.”

The military’s tolerance of KBR misconduct was aptly illustrated in May, when a Congressional investigation found that the Army paid the contractor $80 million in bonuses for the very work that had killed soldiers like the Green Beret. The Pentagon also eventually gave bonuses to KBR for its work at Qarmat Ali—even though the facility was not fully restored until 2006, three years past the Army’s original deadline.

But it took twice as long—six years—for the Army to alert the National Guardsmen from Indiana, West Virginia and Oregon that they were possibly exposed to sodium dichromate.

Sgt. Powell received a letter from the military in February 2009, one year after he was discharged from the West Virginia Guard due to recurring medical problems, which he blames on his exposure. In mid-June, he received a follow-up call from an Army Colonel. It was “a check in the box type thing,” Powell said. “It didn’t give me a warm fuzzy…that they were really going to look into it and do the right thing.”

Some veterans, like Indiana Sgt. David Rancourt, were never notified. He found out from a fellow soldier in 2008 and promptly called the Army to ask why he had not been contacted. He is still waiting for an answer. “It was pure chance that I found out,” he said in an interview. “It was upsetting.”

Just months prior, after Sen. Dorgan held his first hearing on Qarmat Ali, he called the commanding general of the Indiana National Guard, who at that point knew nothing about the possible exposure. “It was the first time he had ever heard of it,” Dorgan told DCBureau.

The fact that American forces were exposed to a dangerous chemical mere weeks into an incursion inspired by Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of biological and chemical weapons may be an irony lost on many.

“There was a lot of hype before the operation about the potential for the use of chemicals by the Iraqis,” said a former high-ranking Army official. "The fundamental issue was to protect the soldiers, and the principle focus was to make sure that they were equipped and trained to handle that situation.”

In March 2003, that concern was palpable. “I remember the first few weeks we spent [in Iraq], we were constantly wearing chemical suits,” Capt. Russell Kimberling said.

But “everything had been supposedly cleared” by April, he said, as the haste of the reconstruction phase took over.

Pfc. David Moore being greeted by his ten-year-old daughter after returning form Iraq. Moore died of lung cancer in 2008 after he was exposed to sodium dichromate at Qarmat Ali. Photo courtesy of Photo courtesy of MIke Doyle / Doyle Raizner LLP

In their briefings for project Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) and other ensuing missions, Kimberling and his colleagues were never warned that Saddam Hussein’s army may have committed acts of sabotage, as it did in the first Gulf War, when the Iraqi leader set Kuwait’s oil fields aflame in his infamous “scorched-earth” strategy.

“The Army never told us before the mission that there might be any risk from chemical exposure,” said Powell.

“They made a bigger deal about malaria,” Sam Schultz, an Indiana E5 Squad Leader. The World Health Organization classifies Iraq as having a “low malaria burden.”

But the soldiers could not avoid the whispers about a strange and inexplicable substance at the plant. Lt. Col. James Gentry, the Indiana commander currently in hospice care, said in sworn testimony that his men began hearing rumors from Iraqi workers that there was a chemical on the ground that caused cancer. Gentry passed it along to his superiors and, when he received no reply, wrote a letter to the 220th Military Police Brigade. “We really didn’t understand the hazard…but we asked the questions,” he said in a 2008 deposition. “But it didn’t get anywhere.”

Meanwhile, half of one of Gentry’s units—about 70 men—began experiencing recurring nosebleeds, body rashes, and persistent coughing, the severity of which affected the soldiers’ abilities to perform their duties. Sgt. Schultz remembers watching one of his men develop pneumonia as the chemical invaded his lung. “I’ve never heard of someone getting pneumonia in the desert,” he told DCBureau.

Soldiers who went to sick call were told that they merely suffered from sand and dust allergies. “No one thought twice about it,” Kimberling said.

But to Russell Powell, such an explanation “seemed bogus.”

“After 15 years working as a medic, I knew there was no way that every one of us could be allergic to sand and dust at the same time—for the first time—with such similar symptoms,” Powell said. He started to notice lesions on other soldiers’ hands, arms and faces. One sergeant had developed a hole through his nose from one nostril to the other.

When Powell fell ill after devouring a food ration during a windstorm at Qarmat Ali, military doctors said that he had “flu-like” symptoms and needed to rest. Left alone, Powell passed out, and two soldiers found him later, delirious and coughing up blood. He spent a week in a Kuwaiti hospital getting antibiotics intravenously. No one told him why he was sick.

“The Army trains you to do what you’re told and not to question your upper command,” said Sam Schultz. “When the people you trust tell you that it’s nothing more than irritation from the sand…you expect them to be telling the truth.”

Weeks after KBR mitigated the danger at Qarmat Ali by paving over its chemical-laden areas, the Army began testing its soldiers for possible sodium dichromate exposure. They told Schultz and his Indiana comrades that it was merely a routine physical.  “My nose started to bleed profusely for 10 minutes,” Schultz said. “The doctor told me it was simply because of the dry air, though I never had a nosebleed from dry air like that in my life.” He remembers undergoing an array of tests, but he never got the results. “We were simply told that we flunked the physical,” he said.

Schultz and Kimberling were among the relatively small group of exposed soldiers that were actually tested by the Army. Due to constant site rotations under project RIO, by the time the Army’s medical team arrived at Qarmat Ali in October, only the Indiana unit remained. “There wasn’t a system in place in 2003 that identified where each individual soldier was every day of the operation,” said Army environmental engineer John Resta. As a result, only 137 out of the 600 potentially exposed military personnel—less than thirty percent—underwent testing for sodium dichromate poisoning.

The Army published their findings in a report by the Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine (CHPPM). CHPPM found that “although it is not totally clear or agreed upon what ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’” chromium levels in the blood stream are, there “was not a significant exposure from sodium dichromate at Qarmat Ali.” But according to Dr. Herman Gibb, an epidemiologist and former Environmental Protection Agency official, the CHPPM report “is confusing and lacks sufficient detail.”

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Dr. Herman Gibb discusses the toxicity of sodium dichromate.

Testifying in front of the Democratic Policy Committee in August, Dr. Gibb said that CHPPM’s testing occurred too late—one to two months after exposure had ended—and used an insensitive blood test that only measured a portion of the possible chromium remaining in the soldiers’ bodies. "It would be like giving a breathalyzer to a person three days after they were pulled over for erratic driving,” he said.

Gibb concluded that, based on CHPPM’s own findings, those stationed at the water facility could have been exposed to air concentrations of sodium dichromate 80 to 200 times the exposure limit allowed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). A regulatory agency for domestic work sites, OSHA does not have jurisdiction in Iraq—a “huge gaping loophole” according to George Washington University professor Celeste Monforton, an expert on occupational safety laws.

In 2000, while he was still working for the EPA, Gibb authored two landmark studies of production plant workers, which found that sodium dichromate was associated with an increased risk of lung cancer. “The signs of irritation which the soldiers and workers experienced at Qarmat Ali are consistent with what we reported in our study,” Gibb said. His findings were echoed by Aaron Barchowsky, the University of Pittsburgh toxicologist, who wrote in a letter to Sen. Dorgan that CHPPM’s report “indicates a lack of understanding of chromium kinetics and toxicity”:

“The timeline of events during and following the Qarmat Ali exposures indicate that military and KBR personnel were exposed to toxic levels of sodium dichromate. The military response to the exposures and the scientific basis for their risk assessment are questionable and do not appear to follow acceptable practice.”

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Dr. Herman Gibb explains the errors in the Army's testing.

Until January 2009, CHPPM’s controversial medical evaluation remained classified—prohibiting soldiers, in addition to medical professionals, from accessing the results. Instead, the Army prepared a fact sheet riddled with inaccuracies and lacking information  that, according to the Indiana Guardsmen, reflected the Army’s continuous attempts to temper any alarm over sodium dichromate. “They told us that lots of industrial chemicals were used in Iraq,” said Sgt. Rancourt. “It gave me the impression that it was not something they were concerned with.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs has used CHPPM’s questionable assessment as grounds for withholding medical benefits from exposed soldiers, even saying in a response to one veteran’s inquiry that “the VA has not determined that a positive association exists between exposure to sodium dichromate and the subsequent development of any chronic health problems.” Yet the EPA has classified the chemical compound, when inhaled, as posing the highest cancer risk of any other EPA-classified substance. “It’s been known for 60 years that sodium dichromate is toxic,” Dr. Gibb told DCBureau.

But when former Army combat engineer Glenn Bootay sought medical care at a VA clinic after returning from Iraq, he said he was told to “just deal with it.” By then Bootay, who spent several nights at Qarmat Ali in April 2003, had lost over 25 pounds. Desperation took him to the Mayo Clinic in Florida, where doctors provided him with a feeding tube. If he had stayed at the VA, they told him, he likely would have died.

Since returning home to Pennsylvania, Bootay has been hospitalized numerous times, as he wages a battle on two fronts—a disease that prevents him from holding a job and a VA that continues to deny him care, including paying for the life-saving treatment he received at Mayo. He is only 30 years old. “I believe my battle with illness would have been different if I had been told by the Army that I was exposed to sodium dichromate,” Bootay told the DPC between labored breaths. “I am fighting for my life and desperately need these [health] benefits.”

“But,” he added, “I wonder if I will live long enough to receive them.”

Click here for more details on the Army's suspicious science.

Bootay’s anxiety has become reality for some servicemen. Sgt. First Class David Moore, a platoon leader and 20-year veteran of the Indiana Guard, died in 2008 from a rare form of lung disease after returning from Iraq, where he made routine visits to Qarmat Ali. Another Oregon infantryman, Nick Thomas, succumbed to leukemia at the age of 21 after serving guard duty at the Basra water plant. These deaths have provided other veterans with a gloomy reminder of their possible fate. “It’s disheartening to know that I may not be able to see my sons graduate from high school and college, get married, or hold my grandchildren,” said Powell.

Puzzlingly, Sgt. Moore’s death was ruled combat-related. When asked why, despite this determination, the VA has refused to connect other veterans’ health problems to their service at Qarmat Ali, a VA spokeswoman did not return phone calls.

“The VA doesn’t give you a lot of answers,” said Sam Schultz. “They ignore it to a certain extent.”

“There is no excuse for allowing service members to suffer from conditions that are related to an exposure while deployed,” Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told DCBureau. According to Rieckhoff, Qarmat Ali is “the most cut and dry case” in “a disturbing pattern of continued exposure to hazardous materials for troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.” As early as 2005, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Defense Department officials acknowledged that there had been numerous instances of environmental hazards endangering their personnel serving in the two wars.

“No soldier wants to be sick,” said Steve Robertson, Legislative Director for the American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans organization. “So when a soldier says he has a medical problem, it’s the government’s responsibility to figure out the cause.”

Instead, the Army has used CHPPM’s medical prerogative to sever links between soldiers’ illnesses and their exposure to known toxins. When, earlier this year, 400 members of the armed forces reported health complications as a result of choking fumes spewed by massive, KBR-run trash pits on military bases, CHPPM officials responded by conducting a site evaluation. Like Qarmat Ali, they concluded that “long-term health effects are not expected to occur,” despite the fact that a prior Air Force review had classified the pits as a “health hazard” that one assessor called “the worst environmental site I have personally visited." A final draft of CHPPM’s report had to be redacted after it was found to contain incorrect toxin concentrations and calculation errors.

“It’s a chicken-and-the-egg type thing,” said Robertson. “As long as they can keep that doubt out there, it’s to their advantage.”

That advantage is critical for an institution that prides itself on its infallibility, where sickness is often equated with weakness. “It’s career damaging,” Robertson explained. “They’re not going to re-enlist you if you’re sick. If you want to be a career soldier, they’re going to say, ‘Just suck it up and move on.’”

“Suck it up” is precisely what many veterans of Qarmat Ali have been told since they were notified of their exposure. Capt. Kimberling recounted a conversation he had with a colonel about sodium dichromate last year. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid, most people exposed to stuff like that will live pretty much a normal life,’” Kimberling said. “And that’s a typical military answer.”

“It’s that whole John Wayne thing,” Robertson added.

This mentality is grounded in the myopia that governs military protocol, including the Pentagon’s standards for evaluating health hazards. “Since military ORM (Operational Risk Management) focuses on the success of the current mission,” reads the Army’s Military Exposure Guidelines, “health effects that have immediate impacts and affect personnel functional capabilities are of greater concern than delayed health effects (e.g., increased risk of cancer).”

Sgt. David Rancourt with an Iraqi worker at Qarmat Ali. "The Army dropped the ball," he said.

And regardless of the conventional wisdom, in the theater of war, a good soldier obeys. “If someone of a higher rank than you tells you to do something, you do it,” said Schultz. “You don’t ask questions.”

But now, a half-decade later, these soldiers want answers. “The Army dropped the ball,” said Rancourt, who is forced to drive up to 100 miles from his home in South Bend, Ind., to find a clinic that will treat him. He still struggles to get information from military doctors, whose superiors maintain that his respiratory ailments bear no connection to his patrol on a poisonous patch of land in Iraq six years ago.

“If these soldiers’ medical conditions were as bad before they left as they were when they returned, they never would have been allowed to deploy in the first place,” said Robertson. “What, did they get it on their flight back?”