This review of The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers is tough to read, and the book is undoubtedly much tougher. The book appears to be an unblinking exposé of horrific abuse of US military personnel. From H. Patricia Hynes at antiwar.com:
The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers
A book by Joseph Hickman
They are called “this generation’s Agent Orange” – the open fire pits operated on over 230 U.S. military bases across Iraq and Afghanistan during our wars there. Every kind of waste – plastics; batteries; old ordnance; asbestos; pesticide containers; tires; biomedical, chemical and nuclear waste; dead animals; human feces; body parts; and corpses – was incinerated in them.
The word “incinerate,” suggesting an enclosed burning facility with pollution controls, is misleading. These barbaric burn pits were dug on military bases in the midst of 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. Ash laden with hundreds of toxins and carcinogens blackened the air and coated clothing, beds, desks and dining halls, according to a Government Accounting Office investigation. The burn pits recklessly violated the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Defense waste disposal regulations. And predictably, base commanders temporarily shut them down when politician and high-ranking generals came to visit.
Some of the US bases were built on the remnants of Iraqi military bases that had been bombed and flattened by US airstrikes. A handful of these bases – at least five – contained stockpiles of old chemical warfare weapons, among them the nerve agent sarin and the blistering agent mustard gas, used by Iraq against Iran and the Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s. The burn pits of these American military bases were placed and dug within the residue of chemical weapons, without first analyzing soil samples.
In his no-holds-barred book, “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers,” former Marine and Army Joseph Hickman exposes the knowing contamination of thousands of soldiers stationed on bases with these lethal pits. After interviewing more than a thousand very sick veterans and military contractors about their exposures and investigating the non-response of the Pentagon, high-ranking military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Veterans Health Administration, the author concludes:
“In my experience as a noncommissioned officer, and after serving twenty years in the military, I can honestly say I would believe the words of a private over a general any day of the week.”
To continue reading: The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers
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