U.S. forces sent to radioactive site now getting cancer

WASHINGTON — For the last six weeks, a private Facebook group set up to help veterans who served at a toxic base in Uzbekistan has been flooded with new members, many with hauntingly familiar stories: I served at K2. I have cancer.

“It was overwhelming,” said retired Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott Welsch, a special operations military intelligence officer who deployed to K2, or KarshiKhanabad, Uzbekistan, in October 2001.

McClatchy exclusively reported in December that the Pentagon had known from the beginning that K2, a former Soviet and Uzbek base, was contaminated with radioactive processed uranium, chemical weapons remnants and underground pools of fuel and solvents that broke through the soil in a “black goo.”

Despite the contamination, about 7,000 U.S. forces were deployed there after the 9/11 attacks, from October 2001 to 2005, until Uzbekistan withdrew permission for the United States to use the base.

After the K2 story became public, the veterans’ K2 Facebook site was flooded with new requests to join. Each new member was vetted for their military service. Once accepted, more names of ill veterans began to surface.

As the new stories came in, Welsch volunteered to track the reported illnesses. But he had to step away.

“I was in bad shape from reporting all these medical issues,” said Welsch, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2014.

By the end of January the group had recorded 310 cancers.

The last government count, done by the Army in 2015, was that 61 service members who had been at K2 were diagnosed with cancer. That study was prompted by a number of U.S. Army Special Operations Command forces at K2 who had developed various types of cancer.

Despite the Army Special Operations Command requesting the review, special operations forces personnel could not be identified because of the classified nature of their missions, so those illnesses likely were not included in the 2015 count, the Army said at the time.

The self-reported 310 cancers from the K2 veterans group, if accurate, means the number of cancer-stricken K2 veterans is now five times greater than the Army reported.

Some of those K2 veterans will be in Washington this week, looking for help from Congress.

“I’ve been wondering all of these years, ‘How many more, how many more. How many more?’” said Kim Brooks, widow of Army Lt. Col. Timothy Brooks.

Timothy Brooks was one of the first to deploy to K2, and one of the first K2 veterans to die of cancer.