US military bases - the polluters

My nephew, an Army veteran who spent most of his 20 plus years military service as an officer in South Korea, is now a civilian military contractor living on a base in Afghanistan. Our only conversation about US military pollution in South Korea was something of a nonstarter.

Pat Hynes worked as a Superfund engineer for the US EPA New England. A retired Professor of Environmental Health, she directs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in western Massachusetts. Here’s more in the professor’s own tongue from a short, but informative article on the US military bases’ pollution.

These two Asian countries, Afghanistan and South Korea, so disparate in development, economy and stability, have something in common – severely polluted US military bases, for which our country, the US, takes little to no financial responsibility. The polluter pays does not apply to the United States military abroad. Nor do civilian workers and most US soldiers stationed at these bases have a chance of winning medical compensation for their military pollution-related illness.

Consider the barbaric military burn pits. In its haste for war, the US Defense Department ignored its own environmental regulations and approved open-air burn pits – "huge poisonous bonfires" – on hundreds of US bases in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. They were cited in the midst of base housing, work and dining facilities, with zero pollution controls. Tons of waste – an average of 10 pounds daily per soldier – burned in them every day, all day and all night, including chemical and medical waste, oil, plastics, pesticides and dead bodies. According to a Government Accounting Office investigation, Ash laden with hundreds of toxins and carcinogens blackened the air and coated clothing, beds, desks and dining halls. A leaked 2011 Army memo warns that health risks from burn pits could reduce lung-function and exacerbate lung and heart diseases, among them COPD, asthma, atherosclerosis or other cardiopulmonary diseases.

Predictably, base commanders temporarily shut them down when politicians and high-ranking generals came to visit. Few veterans exposed to burn pit toxins have won compensation for their severe, chronic respiratory illness. No local Afghani or Iraqi citizen or independent military contractor ever will. Wars may end, bases may close, but the US toxic military footprint remains as a poisonous legacy for future generations.

Consider next the 250 barrels of Agent Orange herbicide and hundreds of tons of hazardous chemicals, buried at the Army’s Camp Carroll, South Korea, according to the testimony of three former US soldiers in May 2011. Veteran Steve House said, "We basically buried our garbage in their backyards." Early reports about the US excavating decomposing drums and contaminated soil from the base do not disclose their whereabouts. Environmental studies conducted by the US forces at Camp Carroll in 1992 and 2004 found soil and groundwater seriously contaminated with dioxin, pesticides and solvents. These results were never acknowledged to the South Korean government until the US veterans’ testimony to news media in 2011.

Camp Carroll is situated near the Nakdong River, the drinking water source for two downstream major cities. Cancer rates and mortality for nervous system diseases among Koreans in the area around the US base are higher than the national average. I, the author, have friends in Asian countries with historic ties to the United States from World War II, countries that are wary of China for its alleged aggressive economic ambitions. While most of these friends strongly resent the US military presence in their countries, a few do express a sense of security having US military bases as a counterbalance to China. However, this does remind me of kids relying on schoolyard bullies, whose tensions and tactics hardly advance children’s maturity not to mention regional stability in Asia.

The American people’s hard-earned taxes support at least 800 foreign bases, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and military contractors in more than 70 countries. The rest of the world combined has some 30 foreign bases. Consider, too, that the United States is the lead global merchant of military weapons, with $42 billion in sales and an expected increase in 2018. The US government’s proposed budget for 2018 increases military defense spending -already more than all domestic spending for education, housing, transportation infrastructure, environment, energy, research, and more - at the expense of cuts to domestic programs.

Not only do we, the Americans leave dangerously polluted environments all over the world in a so-called global role as top cop while our peddlers of weapons profit from conflict across the world, but the rulers do so at the neglect of our own citizens inside the United States. Of course they are also in a kind of police state. Former US President Eisenhower said once in 1953: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. President Eisenhower reiterated: This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

According to a new national survey, one in 10 young American adults experienced some form of homelessness in the previous year, with nearly 3.5 million people aged 18 to 25 sleeping in shelters and cars. The study by Chapin Hall, a youth policy center at the University of Chicago, also found that at least one in 30 teenagers aged 13-17 experienced homelessness over the same period. The study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, polled more than 26,000 young people and their families across the country to gauge how many of them had been homeless during that period.

The survey identified college students, graduates and employed young people who struggled to find a permanent place to stay. It also found that homelessness was no less prevalent in rural areas than in urban locations, and that certain groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, as well as those who do not complete high school, are at greater risk. The researchers concluded, “Every day of housing instability and the associated stress represents a missed opportunity to support healthy development and transitions to productive adulthood”. The findings are staggering. They are alarming, but they’re not necessarily surprising. Many young people are getting hammered in this economy and far too many youth have experienced trauma and lack stable family situations. You have a major affordable housing crisis.

According to a recent government study, the number of homeless people in the United States has increased for the first time since 2010, driven by a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles, California, and other West Coast cities. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a report released last month Nearly 554,000 people were homeless across America during a one-night count in January of this year, a nearly 1 percent increase from 2016. Yes, these are parts of the untold story of US wrong policies inside and abroad; ruining everything as a matter of fact.

EA/ME