Bethany featured in Tribune-Review article on “burn pits”

My wife was featured in an article on the burn pits that have been standard operating procedure for getting rid of waste in war zones by the U.S. military for the last decade. Soldiers who have been in the vicinity of these burn pits have come down with all sorts of illnesses, including leukemia.

The Tribune-Review is the more conservative of Pittsburgh’s two newspapers. If anyone remembers the “Whitewater” investigations on the Clintons from the early 1990’s, the Trib was the driver on many of those.

The comparison is made for these “burn pits” as being something like the “Agent Orange” of this generation of soldiers. There is in fact an extensive class action lawsuit being filed not against the military (whose standard policy this is), but against Kellogg, Brown, & Root and Halliburton, the government contractors which became responsible for operating the burn pits. (I don’t believe my wife will be eligible to be part of the lawsuit; she was in Iraq from April-October 2003, which was prior to Halliburton’s arrival there). But as the article notes:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has commissioned the Institute of Medicine to conduct a study for release this fall to determine whether Bugay’s cancer and the illnesses of perhaps thousands of other veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are linked to exposure to the burn pits. If so, that would make them eligible for disability benefits from the VA. About 2.2 million members of the military have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

This is an issue that we’ll be watching closely.

There are photos here showing showing some of my wife’s service, and her exposure to the burn pits; I’ve been chronicling her illness and treatment at my personal blog.

Again, I’d like to thank those of you who have helped us financially and with your prayers. The meat of Beth’s treatment, the “bone marrow transplant”, is still ahead of us. The effects of that will take months to cycle through.