Hundreds of military veterans and their families were on Capitol Hill this week, demanding an end to what they call a cruel government bottleneck. They are pushing for the passage of the Ensuring Justice for Camp Lejeune Victims Act, a bipartisan bill meant to bypass bureaucratic delays.
Four years after Congress passed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, the initial historic law to compensate those poisoned by toxic base water, fewer than one percent of the more than 400,000 claims have been resolved.
Read more: Camp Lejeune Justice Act Series
For more than two decades, advocates Jerry Ensminger and Mike Partain have walked the concrete sidewalks to the Capitol steps, fighting for the estimated one million Marines and families poisoned by contaminated wells at Camp Lejeune between 1953 and 1987.
But this week, their focus isn't just on the history of the contamination—it's on the Department of Justice, which they accuse of deliberately stalling the legal process to protect government pockets.
Mike said, “You got these career DOJ attorneys that are basically stepping in and thwarting the will of Congress and doing what they want rather than following what the law says. And we got to get them on track.” “They don't want to lose,” Jerry added, “They want to keep their perfect track record. I mean, is that justice?”
The science proving the link between the water and deadly diseases is undeniable. Mike said, “We already know that the Marine Corps poisoned a million Marines and their families. We know that the wells were contaminated from 1953 to 1987. We know the conditions that are a result of this. You've got bladder cancer, kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, breast cancer, a whole host of diseases, including Parkinson's and non-cancerous diseases. The science is there.”
North Carolina Congressman Dr. Greg Murphy, who sponsored the new bill, says the data is ironclad. He stood alongside veterans at the rally, calling the current administration’s delays a national disgrace. “I think it's a scar upon our nation that essentially the government knew stuff was going on, hid it, and then tried to run away from it. And that's tragic,” he said, “It took a long time for this to be put into law, that compensation was needed for those victims. Sadly enough, our government has been, I think, drawing or dragging its feet on this. And this is why this other legislation is so critically needed.”
Read more: Judge tosses reports by DoJ expert witness in Camp Lejeune water contamination litigation
For families on the ground, the delays mean surviving the devastating, multi-generational grief without any sense of closure. Jessica Allen’s grandparents were stationed at the base in the 1950s. They lost an infant child and died young from cancer—as did Jessica's mother, who was carried at the base. Jessica describes the moment she connected the dots using military archives. “I got an Ancestry account and I looked up the muster sheets and I saw my grandfather's name there. I fell to my knees. I fell to my knees because I've been asking the question for, at that point, 25 years, ‘Why did this happen to our family?” she said. “Why do we have this genetic curse?’”
J. Denise Cromwell traveled from Charleston, South Carolina. Her husband served two tours at Lejeune, starting in 1981. After decades of health battles and severe infertility, he was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer. “He lasted longer than they said, but he kept going down, down, down. By this time, my daughter had, our only child that we adopted, had a baby girl. So, he lasted six months and bonded with her for six months.”
Audrey Williams Pride was married to a sailor at the base in 1986. She conceived a child, but went to the emergency room just days before her due date. “I found a little bit of blood and I called my doctor. He said, ‘You shouldn't be bleeding.’ Now mind you, I'm almost at my due date. I'm close to I could go in and have the baby. He said, but I want you to just go to the emergency room and get checked because that shouldn't be happening. So, we go through the emergency room and they put me on a machine and they could not find a heartbeat. They call my doctor. He comes in and he checks me and they tell us that the baby has passed.”
Beyond the grief, the current battle on the Hill centers on a highly controversial legal motion by the government: "future offsets." The DOJ wants to slash a victim's final payout by the projected cost of any future federal benefit they might become eligible for—including Medicare or VA care—whether the victim ends up using those services or not. “This is like a tax on your settlement just in case you do use...how the hell you do that?” Jerry said, adding, “My message to the court is, how are you going to rule on something that doesn't even exist or doesn't exist now and may never exist? How are you ruling on that? Are you going to approve a tax on these people's settlements based on a supposition? Because that's what it is.” "And the other part of it too is, the absurdity of this is you've got the defendant dictating to their victims how and where they're going to receive medical treatment,” Mike added, “That's wrong. I mean, it's just wrong.”
Read more: Camp Lejeune water contamination survivor turns to AI and music for advocacy
Kathryn Vereck of Sarasota, Florida, whose husband died after battling both kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, says these government "clawbacks" threaten to leave families with absolutely nothing. She said, “The clawback would be if we got $1 million, $400,000 goes to the attorney, $600,000 goes to pay back the private health insurance, and so all this results in nothing for my family.”
Kathryn also said the emotional toll of fighting the government while mourning is too heavy a burden for survivors to carry alone, “It destroys a family. It's not just one person that dies young and dies terribly. There's a huge wake left for the family. You know? I spent a lot of years trying not to kill myself.”
Advocates say the government's stance boils down to pure financial self-interest, painting victims as a burden to American taxpayers. Mike Partain recalls a striking encounter from a decade ago when a congressional staffer asked how the government would ever afford to pay for the damage they caused.
“We were presenting the information of what happened in Camp Lejeune. This is around 2012, 2013. And one of the general counsels for the senator, Senator (Ted) Cruz's office, jumped up and said, ‘How are we going to pay for this?’ And Jerry about exploded. He's like, ‘Are you kidding me? I mean, these people served our country. Our country poisoned them. And you're wondering how you're going to pay for it? That should be the last question that should be asked.”
Congressman Murphy says keeping this public pressure alive is the only way to force the bill through a gridlocked legislature. “This is one of the most frustrating things I have in Washington. There are 14, 15,000 bills that get submitted every year, two to four percent become law,” he explained, “It is through advocacy. It is through events like this that keep the pressure up. I keep the pressure up, but it's also great to have other advocacies growing in and making sure that this is always top of the mind to other legislators to try to get this done.”
For the veterans and families, it is a race against time. They say the legal system must stop treating American heroes like legal liabilities.
