Something in the AirDan Rather Host, Dan Rather Reports
Posted: April 26, 2010 09:49 PM
American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from new ailments that have nothing to do with bullets or bombs or battlefield stress. It was, they believe, something in the air.
As you might imagine, an army produces a lot of garbage. And the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan has burned tons of that trash since the beginning of the war. But these are not your average country trash fires. They are called burn pits and they are enormous, one was the size of several football fields. What's burned? Everything. Plastic to foam to batteries, computers and paint, even human body parts — you name it — it was stacked in these burn pits and set ablaze. Many times jet fuel was used as the igniter.
Thick, choking smoke from the fires often hung over U.S. bases for days and soldiers complained of the smell from the potentially toxic clouds. And now vets returning to the US are learning their battles are far from over, and some are blaming the smoke for lung ailments and other illnesses including cancer. Hundreds of plaintiffs have recently filed a lawsuit. The defendant is a familiar name from the Iraq war, KBR, Kellogg Brown and Root. The company was contracted by the military to burn the trash.
The largest burn pit was at Balad Air Base near Baghdad. It was the transit zone for thousands of soldiers entering Iraq. In his first television interview, a bio-environmental engineer is stepping forward to tell of what he witnessed at Balad. Retired Lt. Colonel Darrin Curtis told me of constant complaints from soldiers at the base. In 2006 he sent a memo up the chain of command stating that it was "amazing that the burn pit has been allowed to operate without restrictions over the past few years with no significant engineering controls put in place." Curtis listed contaminants such as benzene, arsenic, hydrogen cyanide, sulfuric acid, and warned that burn pits could pose acute and long-term health hazards. Curtis says his warnings were ignored. And he wasn't the only one to raise alarm. We found documents from a Marine Corps flight surgeon and the Army Corps of Engineers warning of health risks from the burn pit, including lung damage and cancer.
Now doctors studying these cases tell us they believe we could see thousands more become ill from the burn pits. 
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