More Shit To Worry About 2022

What, me worry?
Uhhh, this time?  Yeah.

So, I just found out that huge portions of my childhood were spent wading in a chemical cesspool.
You see, I spent pretty much every summer of my life from infancy to about sixteen at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina.  The other night I had the TV on with the sound off and Camp LeJeune's iconic entry gate sign flashed up on the screen.  Immediately struck (that sign is part of my life), I read the scroll:
Did you work or live at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps. base between 1953 and 1987?
Ahh, yes.  Yes I did.  Why do you ask, TV?

It was a beautiful cesspool though.  Camp LeJeune is on the coast of North Carolina, near Jacksonville, in the southern part of the state, just below the Outer Banks.  It sits on a confluence of rivers, tidal flats, inlets, the Intracoastal Waterway and Onslow Bay.  The landscape is that of the piney lowlands.  It was idyllic.  Think The Prince of Tides (the non-Barbra parts).  We'd live there, on the base, every summer at the Onslow Beach campground in a trailer.  The beach was pristine; like we had our own private slice of the Carolina coast.

We really did sort of have the beach to ourselves, most of the time, like some fin de siecle robber baron family.  It wasn't a public beach.  You'd walk up the dusty road from the campground to the dunes.  To the right was the enlisted men's beach house, about an eighth of a mile down.  And then, to the left, was the officer's beach pavilion.  It was maybe a half a mile down.  So that's where we'd go, since my dad was an officer.  It was a little more posh than the enlisted men's section; but it was still pretty honky-tonk.  I remember they had these burgers, pre-made, wrapped in foil and heated beneath lamps.  They weren't the best quality--they had those little hard bits, like toe-nail clippings--but they were tasty.

So, we were about as far from the actual source of the cesspool as we could've been; or am I allowing myself some false sense of security?  Or should I say, "kidding" myself?  Since I've learned of this catastrophe, I keep thinking back on my water intake back then.  I remember there was a water fountain outside of the beach house.  I can taste it right now...luke-warm with a decidely rusty taste.  It was unpalatable, which in retrospect was probably a good thing.  It kept us from drinking a lot of it.  But you know kids when they see a water fountain.  They have to drink from it, just because.  I can see the white porcelain right now, stained with streaks of rust that looked like dried blood.

Was that water that came out of that drinking fountain tainted?  Was it laced with benzene, tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene?  Those chemicals are used in making plastic, dry cleaning fluid and metal degreaser.  Actually, it was a drycleaners in Jacksonville, off base, that was the source of a majority of the chemicals: improperly disposed of that then leached into the ground water.

Here's a closer up map:

Our campground was on the yellow spit of land where it says "Atlantic Ocean."  The drycleaners was to the northwest where that pink area is, above the inlet.  Safe?  Who knows.  Because we were all over that base.  And being in the South, it had water fountains everywhere.  We spent a lot of time at the Officer's Club and its pool...oh yes, bathing and swimming in these chemicals wasn't much better than drinking them.  We lived in base housing every now and again.

It was a beautiful place, for a military base.  It was all red brick, colonial revival.  Here's the Catholic church we went to, on the left:

Kind of ironic that the nearly exact focal point of the above is the water tower looming in the distance.
So, did my family ever get sick?  Well, there's an extensive list of illnesses, cancers, and so on that people who lived there are reporting.  Maladies of pretty much all the human body systems: cardiac, reproductive, neurological...
My parents are both 86.  My siblings are all still alive.  But my father has both a pace-maker and a shunt in his head and my mother had a miscarriage in the late 60's.  My older brother had developmental problems as a child.  So far I've been healthy; but I'm still relatively young.  Who knows what I might develop. Or one of my siblings.  We're all close in age (Irish Catholic, natch).  So it's more shit to worry about.  Out of all the dozens (make that hundreds) of military bases in the United States, Camp LeJeune would be the one, right?  And one of the most troubling questions that arises is: why weren't we informed?  1987 is a long time ago now.  You think the Marine Corps. or The Navy or the United States Government might've let us know that we were exposed to this shit.  You know, a little heads up to be on the lookout for, oh, I don't know...tumors and stuff.  Maybe those chemicals made me gay.  Hey, now there's a lawsuit!  What a headline!

                                                        DRY CLEANING TURNS MALE CHILD HOMOSEXUAL!

No, the thing at Camp LeJeune that more than likely made me gay, was all the HOT young Marines parading around in bathing suits:

​Then...

​Now...Marine Life Guard at Onslow Beach

No one in my family was ever a huge water drinker.  But remember back in the day when you'd get a big glass of water, automatically, at a restaurant?  And you'd sip at it because it was there?  And we didn't do the Kool-Aid thing much either, which would've required base water.  No, as kids we sucked down soda like there was no tomorrow.  Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, Pepsi, Sprite, Orange Crush, Fanta...and in the South...tons of Dr. Pepper.  
​Could Dr. Pepper have spared me and my family?

Hmmmm...that's a military man, quite possibly Marine Corps.  And it says right there it's "Good for Life!"
I'm just gonna take this sign as a sign Universe and say a little prayer at 10, 2 and 4!
We were in the water every day.  Perhaps the curative powers of ocean water helped us.  Were we under the benevolent aegis of Poseidon?  The magical protection of the Nereids--who could control the waters?
So, one of the co-hosts of the infomercial about Camp LeJeune was a woman who I've seen on a lot of these lawsuit informercial things.  Her name is Wendy Walsh.  I find her incredibly genuine and well spoken.  Like, if I were to go to court, I'd want her to be my lawyer.  However, she isn't a lawyer, she's a doctor.  She was sexually harassed by Bill O'Reilly, allegedly.  I believe her.  
​Anyways, here she is in the Johnson and Johnson baby powder lawsuit clip:

I want to post some pix of us back in the day, with some more happier associations.  Of course, with this news of a toxic apocalypse at the base, my memories of these salad days will be forever altered...

I will post the family pix at LeJeune in a separate blog.

CFR July 19, 2022