Chief Warrant Officer Scott Welch had heard the rumors about K-2 in July 2002 when he arrived at the secret Uzbek air base in the early months of the Afghanistan War.
Multilingual signs warned of radiation: ponds glowed green, and a fenced off Soviet-era chemical weapons dump leached dangerous chemicals into the ground below.
Yet, 18 years later, the hazards of the base at Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan — and some 300 self-reported veteran cancer cases — go officially unrecognized by the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs.
“All were literally feet from where we lived and worked,” Welch said of the hazards he faced, speaking last week at a House Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing on hazardous exposures and health conditions of veterans deployed in the wake of Sept. 11 to the base known as K-2.
The Subcommittee on National Security Chairman Stephen Lynch told the Washington Examiner that new legislation would get veterans the care they need, but the VA and Defense Department could act now without the bill.
“The legislation is meant to force the VA’s hand and DoD’s hand,” said Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat. “They’re trying to escape liability here, both reputational cost and also medical costs.”
H.R. 5957 passed out of committee and now stands in the full House Armed Services and Veterans Affairs committees for their review while sick veterans wait, the congressman said.
“There’s certainly a resistance to accountability, there’s no doubt about that,” said Lynch, who co-sponsored the legislation introduced by Rep. Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican and himself a K-2 veteran. Green served as an Army special operations flight surgeon with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and had deployed to Karshi-Khanabad after the 9/11 attacks.
The bill would require the Defense Department to create a registry, do an epidemiological study, and determine presumptive conditions for immediate care.
The Department of Defense told the Washington Examiner in a statement that there was no evidence to support increased cancer risks faced by service members deployed at K-2.
“The results of environmental sampling do not support either radiological or toxic chemical exposure hazards existing at K-2,” the statement read.
Welch, Special Operations Air Force veteran P.J. Widener, and Kim Brooks, widow of Lt. Col. Timothy Brooks, all testified on Feb. 27.
Widener said he and fellow K-2 veterans had been duped by Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie.
In his opening statement, Widener read directly from a Feb. 5 invitation by Wilkie to K-2 veterans to come to the VA and get the screenings they need.
“We are aggressively working to get to the bottom of it, but in the meantime, we want people to come to us if they’ve been there,” Wilkie had said at the National Press Club. “This is not your grandfather’s VA, where paperwork is going to last 10 years.”
At first, Widener took the invitation seriously and contacted his group of 3,700 of an estimated 7,000 K-2 veterans, telling them to try again to request the screenings they were denied previously.
Widener shared documents with the Washington Examiner for 15 K-2 veterans who requested screenings after the Wilkie invitation and were again denied.
All were denied depleted uranium or chemical agents tests or disallowed from registering for the Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry, which would automatically qualify them for such tests.
“Telling them to come to the VA so that they can be denied again is not a solution,” said Lynch. “[Wilkie] needs to do much more if he really intends to help these veterans.”
K-2 veterans, such as Widener, who are aware of classified chemical studies of the site, say otherwise, and call for the documents to be released.
After providing the VA with 10 examples of K-2 veterans who were denied screenings, VA spokeswoman Christina Mandreucci told the Washington Examiner that federal law prohibits veterans deployed to Uzbekistan from registering for the Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry.
“Veterans who served at Karshi Khanabad and have medical concerns can see their primary care provider to obtain a medical exam,” she said. “Depleted Uranium tests are normally only done for Veterans who served in the Gulf War, Bosnia, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation New Dawn.”
Mandreucci added that the VA is working closely with the Defense Department to document health status and mortality outcomes for those who served at K-2.
“At this time, the data does not show increased cancer mortality rates. VA continues to review the data and will follow this cohort for trends or emerging issues,” she said. “VA encourages all veterans who feel their military service has affected their health to submit a claim, which will be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis using the latest scientific and medical evidence available.”
Lynch calls the VA response to K-2 veterans “bureaucratic resistance.”
“We’ve run into this before,” he said, citing Iraq and Afghanistan burn-pit hazards that went unrecognized until 2017 and Vietnam veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, which went unrecognized until 1991.
“I think they’re ignoring the evidence. I think there’s a built-in resistance to opening up a significant population to automatic presumption of eligibility,” said Lynch. “Our challenge is to grow an irrefutable body of evidence that will force the VA to acknowledge this and force DoD to acknowledge this as well.”
At the House Oversight hearing, Brooks said that when her husband was diagnosed with stage III brain cancer, he was “angry to be so sick, so young” and did what he could to get others from his K-2 cohort the care they needed.
Lt. Col. Timothy Brooks died in 2004 at age 36, one year and one day after his diagnosis. His medical bills were paid for, as were the education bills of his four children because he was still on active duty when his cancer was detected.
Until K-2 is classified by the Defense Department as a service-related hazard, an unknown number of veterans will die of cancer. Others will wait to get tested, said Lynch.
“This is why we fund the VA,” Lynch said. “This was something that was engaged in as part of their mission.”
