Post-9/11 veterans sickened by toxic chemicals and radiation at an Uzbek airbase used for staging the war in Afghanistan are again absent from must-pass defense legislation, Senate aides told the Washington Examiner.
“There was no comparable amendment offered to the Senate NDAA by any senators,” a Senate Armed Services Committee aide told the Washington Examiner of the $740.5 billion legislation.
The House version of the National Defense Authorization Act included an amendment requiring the Department of Defense to study the effects of contaminants that were present at the airbase known as K2, where some 10,000 veterans served between 2001 and 2005.
“A study will show what we already know: People are dead, dying, and chronically ill at rates several factors higher than similar populations,” said K2 veteran and retired Army Staff Sgt. Mark Jackson, who has chronic thyroid and gastrointestinal problems. “It is a start.”
The amendment was sponsored by Reps. Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican, himself a veteran of the contaminated Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan.
“The House-passed version would require the Department of Defense to conduct an epidemiological study of health effects and exposures at K2,” Lynch told the Washington Examiner.
The Department of Veterans Affairs recently agreed to study the illnesses suffered by K2 veterans. The VA told the Washington Examiner that that study will take up to 18 months to yield initial findings.
Neither study guarantees sick veterans the prescreenings they require.
“In the years since it closed, K2 has been purposefully and successfully forgotten by the government who sent us there,” said Jackson.
Earlier this month, Lynch and Green announced that the Department of Defense had finally conceded to a Subcommittee on National Security request and declassified studies of the contaminated air base.
“Until a few weeks ago, we had no proof,” said Jackson. “Now, we do, in the form of hundreds of pages of declassified contemporary environmental surveys, all of which confirm that K2 was poisonous, irradiated, and toxic.”
K2 veterans had hoped to achieve the classification of Uzbekistan as an Operation Enduring Freedom location, qualifying the veterans for automatic prescreening tests and presumptive status of ailments afforded to those who served in places such as Afghanistan and Djibouti, Africa.
Now that the NDAA has passed in both the House and the Senate, a conference committee will hash out the differences.
“We will encourage the NDAA conferees to accept the current provisions in the House-passed version that would require the Department of Defense to conduct a study on the health effects of toxic exposures on K2 veterans,” a House staffer told the Washington Examiner.
“Because the study was included in the House-passed bill, that means it might be in the final version sent to the president. Both the House and Senate conferees must agree to it,” the staffer added.
Said Lynch: “Hopefully, we will find another way to get this done, but the clock is ticking for a lot of these sick veterans and their families.”
