The Daily Beast ^ | April 24, 2011 | Lloyd Grove
Posted on Monday, April 25, 2011 10:51:24 AM by decimon
Up to a million soldiers and their families were secretly exposed to poisonous water at Camp Lejeune—including Sgt. Jerry Ensminger and his daughter, Janey, who died at 9 of leukemia. He tells his story in a riveting documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, and talks to Lloyd Grove about fighting the Marine Corps brass through Congress, his family’s devastating breakup, and his daughter’s legacy.
On September 24, 1985, Janey Ensminger died of acute lymphocytic leukemia. She had been fighting the disease for nearly 2½ years, and was 9 years and two months old.
Janey’s diagnosis was as baffling as it was cruel. Her two sisters were evidently healthy, and there were no childhood cancers in the family medical histories of either her Okinawan mother, Etsuko, or her American father, Marine Corps Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger.
“We were at the Penn State University Medical Center in Hershey,” Jerry Ensminger tells me, “and I’d go down to the research area, go into the laboratory and talk to the researchers, asking questions: ‘How did this happen? Why? What do you know about it?’ And nobody could give me an answer.”
It wasn’t until 1997 that Ensminger received a shocking clue. Retired to his small North Carolina soybean, corn, and hay farm after a 24-year military career, he was cooking himself dinner when the local news came on: The federal government had just released a report concluding that for nearly three decades the tap water at Camp Lejeune, N.C.—the base where Janey was conceived in December 1975—had been contaminated by toxic chemicals associated with childhood and adult cancers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
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