Cancers strike US military deployed to Uzbekistan after 9/11 | Hacker News Reader

Cancers strike US military deployed to Uzbekistan after 9/11

mcclatchydc.com

61 pointsTomte54 comments

so 20 years ago the US dropped troops into a former military base with ample warnings of chemical and radiation contamination legible in two languages. a sizeable number of them developed cancer. The VA subsequently ignored and marginalized these cases.

>“We were doing a great thing” at K2, said retired Air Force Tech Sgt. Jeff Frisby

two trillion dollars later, this proves to be patently false or at best, arguable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21743782

The US went down this road in Iraq with the burn pit ailments, and again before that with the chemical weapons ailments. Prior to this, Vietnam soldiers and agent orange. at some point this has to stop for recruitment sake. the internet makes it far too easy for the average highschool student to spend 10 minutes catching up on exactly how forgotten a promise the government makes to soldiers after they've fought in service of their country.

I don’t understand why we’re still exposing our troops to harms needlessly. Maybe you can chalk up Agent Orange to a lack of understanding but burn pits and radiation contamination are obviously dangerous.

Harming US troops is part of equation. The local people in the countries suffered more which is usually less concerned than US troops. Not only the chemicals , but also killing each other because of destabilization of the regions.

I really wish recruitment would go down. People really shouldn't be looking at the military in the modern age as the sole opportunity for benefits/money to continue their life into adulthood.

>[...] U.S. special operations forces who deployed to a military site in Uzbekistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks found pond water that glowed green, black goo oozing from the ground and signs warning “radiation hazard. [...]

After returning from combat years later, we are all coming down with various forms of cancer that the [Department of Veterans Affairs] is refusing to acknowledge,” said retired Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott Welsch [...]

That's insane. As someone completely unfamiliar with such proceedings, shouldn't locations be checked for such, well, dramatic attributes? If so, what went wrong here? Because this is not satisfying:

>The U.S. military jumped on using K2 because it had few other good options in the immediate response to 9/11, said former Army Reserve Capt. Ken Richards, who deployed to the base in 2002, and was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2009.

"There were a lot of good reasons to accept what they [the Uzbeks] gave us,” Richards said. “Safety was never an issue.”

Pond water glowing green is almost certainly bioluminescence. Radioactive waste does not give off a green glow, popular myth notwithstanding. (Phosphors will give off a green glow when in very close proximity to an alpha emitter, which is the genesis of this myth, but that is not what we are talking about here).

From a cancer risk standpoint, I'd be far more worried about organic (and metallo-organic) chemical dumping, which is endemic in less developed parts of the world.

And if it actually glowed through Cherenkov radiation (blue instead of green) they'd be dead if they saw it...

That's not to say they didn't likely still end up in a radioactive hellhole though.

Why do you think they would be dead if they saw Cherenkov radiation? It's a matter of depth: if the radioactive material was deep in the pond, they should be fine.

I could see the Cherenkov radiation (indeed blue and not green) when I visited the Cattenom nuclear power plant [1] two decades ago: it was used nuclear fuel (uranium rods) stored at the bottom of a 50 meters deep pool. There was nothing between us (visitors) and the pool. 50 meters of water is pretty good insulation from radioactivity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattenom_Nuclear_Power_Plant

If a pond is glowing blue it's safe to assume there is far more radioactive contamination laying around than there is near the Chernobyl elephant foot. In a reactor it's contained but sitting near some random army base is bit different...

> As someone completely unfamiliar with such proceedings, shouldn't locations be checked for such, well, dramatic attributes?

It's depressing, but not surprising. This was right after 9/11, remember, when the war in Afghanistan was just getting started. Whenever the switch gets flipped from "peacetime" to "wartime," a lot of the military's usual peacetime processes tend to fall by the wayside. Everybody's vision narrows down to just doing whatever needs to get done to win the war.

There's also usually a greater willingness to accept risk to personnel, because the very definition of "risk" shifts. The people you're sending into the field are now facing the very serious risk of bad guys shooting bullets at them all day, so "this place we're billeting them might give them cancer in ten years" seems like less of a big deal than it would in peacetime. If this base was one of the only ways we could get within range to strike a blow at the Taliban, I could totally see a general deciding that it was worth exposing their soldiers to potential health risks years down the line in order to get the capability to strike that blow.

Nothing went "wrong" here, the managers evaluated the risks from their office and decided that this is the greater good. Some other manager now has to deal with the aftermath while meeting their expected budget to get their annual bonus.

To play devil's advocate, yeah that sounds bad, but the article didn't quantify any risks. If the risk of cancer for those stationed there rose by some small fraction of a percent per day, it may still have been basically irrelevant compared to the very real combat risks these people faced. In fact it may well have been irrelevant compared to e.g. A chest or dental x-ray or even a transatlantic flight. We just don't know without hard numbers.

> We just don't know without hard numbers.

If the risk increased only very little, it would be extremely unlikely for there to be such a big blip in cancer occurrence.

The combat risk is always going to be there, but the cancer is not. Putting those against each other isn't terribly relevant from a decision-making standpoint (unless the odds are very, very low - but we know this is not likely)

So really, we can know a few things with a reasonable degree of certainty.

Is it such a big blip? I didn't see that established either, but I may have missed it while skimming through.

The risk of having to support troops from a suboptimal spot further away could have a very real impact on casualty rate in a conflict. So I think you do really have to quantify the tradeoffs here to say if one is better than the other.

It is a big blip, and they talk about it in the article.

No one is asking for a risk-free military experience. They're asking for the VA to cover their medical expenses, which means recognizing that they're a result of their deployment.

Yes, I think this is sufficiently established and the least the government can do here. That we even have to debate that at all is sad.

From the article:

61 people were diagnosed with cancer

7005 people were stationed there

5 brain cancers in 7,005

the US base rate is 1 in 16,000 for brain cancer

(And this might undercount special forces etc etc)

So for brain cancer anyway we're in the neighborhood of an order of magnitude increase in risk over the general population.

This is significant and seems reasonable to say it may be higher than the number of lives that could have been saved in combat by using this base.

Worse than that, not many 70 year olds in the us military.

True this rate will get worse over time.

Many explosives are carcinogens

That's mostly neither here nor there if you don't eat them or handle them directly.

But live ammo training is where soldier breathe in the combustion products and vapours from the portion of explosives that did not combust.

I remember it was late December 2012 when the bulk of my unit was deploying to Kandahar. They had a lay over in either Manas or K2. Keep in mind that this is winter in Siberia and temperatures getting down to -30F at night. This unit was located in West Los Angeles so it was rare for many of these people to ever experience any kind of freezing weather. Due to political boots on ground limits some of us were instead routed to Kuwait and so I never saw K2 myself.

Honest question (since it is essential for any further discussion and the article says nothing about it): Why the USA has to be in Uzbekistan?

“... to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” See Wolfowitz Doctrine

Hearts and minds then.

To ensure a ring of bases around Russia (like a potential base in Crimea before the war in Ukraine) so that any military activity of the latter can be interpreted as aggression (e.g., "Russia tries to re-establish its evil Empire"). [Here we skip intermediate steps]. To make sure people fight "left vs right", "West vs East" instead of the only really important battle of "poor vs rich".

p.s. this particular base is of importance because it is relatively close to future super-powers like China and India.

Schyy.

Americans don't like to be reminded that they are a part of an empire ... but they are.

Deployment as part of Afghanistan operations.

3rd Paragraph

>The base became a critical hub in the early days of the war to provide airdrops, medical evacuation and airstrike support to U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan.

I wasn't precise, I am sorry: I get it that it was/is used for the support of US forces.

I am interested in how the US can put a military base on a piece of land that in not so distant past (ten years prior to 9/11) was part of its arch enemy - the USSR? It may be completely natural to some, but to me that's awkward.

The US asked to put one there, offered them some assistance with security and their own terrorism problems, and they agreed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Uzbekist...

>I am interested in how the US can put a military base on a piece of land...

First the US didn't put the military base there, the military based was already there, the US just put troops and supplies there.

Not sure what the land being part of the USSR in the past has anything to do with the then current military campaign, when the USSR no longer existed. For example the US has maintained military bases and presence in both Germany and Japan since WWII...no one asks how the US could do that in Countries that were former enemy combatants...not to mention no one asks why the US came to the aid of the UK in WWII when they too were former military combatants.

Today that is an US base, it doesn't matter if it existed before or not.

The US has not "maintained" the presence in Germany and Japan. US still maintains presence there. And that 75 years after the WWII ended! Also: The US has fought a major war with Germany and Japan and after their defeat it occupied them (still ocupies them?). All that does bot apply to the former USSR.

> it doesn't matter if it existed before or not.

In the context of your "honest question" it matters. The US was conducting military operations in nearby Afghanistan and there was an unused military base nearby that the US could lease and the US leased it...its not their base or their land, its leased and belongs to Uzbekistan.

>The US has not "maintained" the presence in Germany and Japan. US still maintains presence there. And that 75 years after the WWII ended!

I am having a hard time following your English, but you seemed surprised the US would have a base in former enemy territory (USSR).

So here is a question, how much military experience do you have if any? Because it seems to be basic military strategy, going back to the times of Alexander the Great.

>The US has fought a major war with Germany and Japan and after their defeat it occupied them (still ocupies them?)

Well the US and USSR engaged in a very lengthy cold war...the USSR was defeated resulting in their own voluntary dissolution.

And no the US does not occupy Japan or Germany. We maintain a presence...the same as we maintain a presence in South Korea ever since the Korean war (and South Korea was never our enemy), we certainly don't occupy them.

Here is a list of Russian Military Bases around the World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_military_bases...), as you will note, they have bases in former territories they once occupied/controlled and no longer do. Of course Crimea is of particular concern as that was a sovereign territory and Russian recently violated their sovereignty with illegal use of military force and annexation.

Isn't that, in particular, the land you would most want to put new bases on?

You are right. But, why then do I keep hearing in the western mainstream media about Russia being a threat when it is the USA that puts its base near Russia?

Because when you feel threatened, you are fine that your government passes laws (e.g., surveillance laws) you would never let them to pass.

You don't go out of your way to place a base near another state unless you consider them a threat, or consider them no threat at all but want to conquer them in the near future. I think the former is more likely the intention in this case. If a state's not perceived as a threat and also isn't a likely target for a very one-sided invasion, you probably don't care much about having bases near them.

This dynamic is behind military build-ups, arms races, and increasing tensions and effective ability to act threateningly. You believe a state threatens yours, so you build up on their border, now you threaten them, so they build up more, repeat. Notably this does not happen if neither side perceives the other as threatening in the first place.

IOW placing a base on a rival state's border both is threatening and is also exactly what one does when one perceives same rival as a threat.

There are many vectors that foreign adversaries can be a threat. In Russia's case, they are a threat to our Democratic institutions, but more so a threat to our allies in the region. They are a country well known for their desire for expansion into adjacent nations, even after the fall of the USSR. That's the #1 reason neighboring nations are our/NATOs allies, because they are in fear of Russia.

That base was there long before "the western mainstream media [talked] about Russia being a threat". Its original purpose was to support operations Afghanistan.

Look on a map -- the base is nowhere near Russia proper. You'd have to go well north through the rest of Uzbekistan, then Kazakhstan. If anything it is a statement to Pakistan or Iran.

They were supposed to pay the Uzbeks for access to the base (an old Soviet base) for the Afghanistan war. In the mid-2000s, when it came time to pay the Uzbeks (about $500 million, if memory serves), the Americans decided the Uzbeks were terriss and opted not to pay. The Uzbeks hated the US after that. Absolutely loathed.

(I ended up living there for a year at the end of 2005, so my recollection of details around the finances might be spotty, but my recollection of having Uzbeks explain why it was so fucked up what we did, I will live with forever.)

The US and Uzbekistan initially signed an agreement that let them use the base for free. Then the Uzbeks wanted money, so we started paying ~$20million a year.

Relations got really bad after the Andijan Massacre. The US government (state department and congress) was REALLY critical of Uzbekistan and talked a lot about human rights abuses and cutting aid. Maybe that's where you're getting the $500 million figure from? Canceled aid payments that were conditional on the government making humans rights improvements, not the use of the base? Anyways, 2 months after Andijan and one day after the first planeload of refugees got a flight to Romania, the US received an eviction notice. We continued to pay the rest of the lease, and actually delivered a final $22.9 million payment after we got the eviction notice, days before the final Americans left.[1] If you want to read a description of events that is still biased, but in the other direction you can see the Air Force's timeline of what happened [2].

[1]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/12/why-did-we-send-...

[2]: https://www.airforcemag.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/20...

In the era of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Uzbeks felt like any US posturing on human rights was just that -- posturing. They were also resentful at the US treating their sovereignty as a new-millennium extension of the Great Game. As for the $500 million, you're right, I don't remember what they said it was for, it's been close to 15 years.

Very interesting, thanks.

Based on these revelations about the cancer, they did us a massive favor when they evicted us.

Pretty much this:

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/64/9f/29/649f29232b7d89e9aee662222...

According to the graphic, those are NATO bases. NATO != USA. Countries join NATO willingly because they perceive some kind of threat and want help from others if they're attacked.

Those are all US military bases. Other NATO countries have equipment based there as well, but they're ran and funded by the US.

I'm reminded of a story from a HN commenter who was a US soldier. He said in his unit he's been trained and tasked with cleaning rifles with brushes, rags, (no gloves) and an unlabelled liquid cleaning product. After years of doing that, one day he stumbled upon a label for that product, which said (paraphrasing) that it was a dangerous carcinogen chemical and should never come into contact with skin.

I see zero attempt to compare this to expect levels so are putting this down to normal junk science for the masses.

"black goo oozed, ponds glowed" is laughable.

We know putting people overseas will cause them health issues (ie cancer), we see this with all military deployments and non military for instance in the Cuba embassy.

But what's hilarious is PM (particulate matter) which we know causes cancer is admitted to be high by the military on this base, but not even mentioned in the article. I kinda give up.

Someone should go rot in jail. Maybe a lot of people. We're talking about many lives here. Eventually someone in the chain of command knew or should have know this.

Maybe karma for what the US did to the Marshall Islands? [0][1]

I'm surprised the government doesn't approach any preexisting military base with suspicion and caution considering its own history of contaminating grounds with military activity.

To this day military bases across the US have contaminated groundwater from the relatively benign activity of using firefighting foam. [2] And that's in the US where there's supposedly an EPA and oversight of such things. At this point any grounds having experienced significant military activity should be presumed contaminated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands#Health

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runit_Dome

[2] https://phys.org/news/2019-10-firefighting-foam-toxic-legacy...

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