[FOXNEWS] U.S. troops who risked their lives battling insurgents in Afghanistan for years faced another unseen enemy at bases across the country: toxic fumes from open-air “burn pits” that were used long after orders to phase them out.Just as a whiff of nuoc mam or fermented (i.e., rotted) duck eggs can take me back almost fifty years in an instant, so can a 55-gallon drum full of poop mixed with diesel fuel burning ever so merrily in the fresh morning air. Don't believe me? Ask someone who was there. To almost quote General Sherman: "War is smell."
A scathing new watchdog report details the extent of the “indefensible” practice.
There's lotsa things you have to get rid of, to include poop. Them crappoires gotta be emptied now and then. If there's no recycle center close by -- the Karzai brothers coulda made millions if they'd thought of it! -- y'gotta do it yourself.
The report says the U.S. military even spent millions on incinerators as a trash-burning alternative, yet several of them did not work or were never turned on, wasting $20 million and leaving troops to breathe pollution from the burn pits instead.
An incinerator that didn't work, versus a burn pit that did. I see their problem: You're supposed to put the burn pit in the incinerator. You still have to set fire to it, regardless of what the EPA says.
“Given the fact that [the Department of Defense] has been aware for many years of the significant health risks associated with open-air burn pits, it is indefensible that U.S. military personnel, who are already at risk of serious injury and death when fighting the enemy, were put at further risk from the potentially harmful emissions from the use of open-air burn pits,” John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), said in his findings.
Basic load for a U.S. infantry company doesn't include an incinerator. They'd have to bring back the mules to carry it. It does include a few packs of matches and somebody might even be carrying a Zippo.
The report coincides with a separate class-action lawsuit -- by hundreds of veterans who say they were sickened by exposure to burn pits over the course of the 13-year war -- that is moving closer to a trial.
Unless you've whiffed a 55-gallon drum full of poop and diesel fuel burning you don't know what sickened is.
That suit, lodged against private contractors KBR and its former parent company Halliburton Co., is headed back to U.S. District Court in Maryland after the U.S. Supreme Court declined in January to take up the defendants’ appeal for a dismissal.