Ohio mother of Iraq vet pushes Congress on burn pits
WASHINGTON — Susan Zeier of Sandusky, Ohio, had every reason to believe that when her son-in-law came home from Iraq after serving in 2006, his war was over. In fact, it had just begun. Her son-in-law, whom she will not identify to preserve his medical privacy, was diagnosed in March 2017 with Stage 4 nonsmall-cell adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer that has no primary tumor and is extremely difficult to treat. He is 37 and has a 4-year-old daughter.
In Iraq, he had a job that put him outside near a burn pit used to dispose of everything from everyday trash to chemicals to medical waste to pesticides to asbestos to human remains.
On Thursday, as she stood on Capitol Hill with others affected, Zeier held a sign picturing her granddaughter that said: “Tell her that burn pits aren’t the reason her daddy is dying.”
Hours later, Zeier, garbed in her son-in-law’s Army coat, sat with veterans wearing surgical masks and family members who have lost loved ones to lung diseases and other ailments after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan while lawmakers debated the effect of burn pits on the health of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“These burn pits are the Agent Orange of the post-9/11 generation of veterans,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, referring to the toxin that affected Vietnam War veterans. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, ruefully recalled seeing fellow service members who lived and worked near the burn pits sick with something they called “the crud” — a hacking, wheezing lung infection that was widespread.
“Veterans deserve to know what is making them sick,” said Ken Wiseman, associate legislative director at the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, testifying Thursday before the House Veterans Affairs’ Committee’s Subcommittee on Health.
Subcommittee Chairman Neil Dunn, R-Calif., Megan Kingston of Virginia, who served as a military medic in Iraq, wears an oxygen tube while attending a U.S. House committee hearing in the Capitol on Thursday. She said she suffers from constrictive bronchitis and pulmonary fibrosis as a result of exposure to burn pits. questioned whether the veterans suffering from health problems might be dealing with “an inflammatory reaction to the local environment.”
He said he worries that the “narrow focus” on burn pits might cause researchers to ignore “particulate matter” as well as other unknown pathogens “that could have an even greater risk to those deployed in the Middle East.”
Other lawmakers were more alarmed.
“Who’s the genius who came up with this idea?” said Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who questioned why burn pits were used. “We’ve essentially as a nation delivered chemical and biological weapons upon our own troops.”
He and other lawmakers expressed dismay that the Department of Defense have a representative at the hearing.
To Zeier, the issue is a no-brainer: You don’t have to be a doctor to know that burning toxins can cause people to get sick, she said.
She remembers when her son-in-law was diagnosed. The cancer was so rare, she said, that the doctor wept.
“What the hell were you exposed to?” the doctor asked her son-in-law.
Now, Zeier said, her sonin-law is fighting for his life. Her daughter is working to take care of him and their daughter.
Zeier tries to help them, but it’s a lot to handle.
“I just want them to acknowledge that they did this,” she said of the military. “They did this.”