What is a burn pit?

Coverage of the PACT Act, a bill before the Congress that would provide money to cover Veterans Affairs funding for veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals and smoke created by burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, has focused on the 25 Senators who changed their votes and opposed passage of the bill last week.  A version of the bill had been approved by the Senate on June 16 in a 84-14 vote.  But when the bill came up for a second procedural vote last Wednesday, the Senate voted for it 55-42, failing to reach the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster.

What changed in the interim?  Well, a Senator from Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey, suddenly discovered what he called a budget “gimmick” in the new version of the bill, which had been slightly modified by the House.  The PACT Act authorizes $280 billion in new mandatory spending for the VA, but Toomey said the gimmick he suddenly found would convert the prior $400 billion in spending authorization from discretionary to mandatory which Toomey said would allow future budgets to be manipulated by greedy Democrats. 

Democrats said there was no gimmick in the bill, that the House modifications Toomey objected to had nothing to do with mandatory spending measures, and the whole thing amounted to retaliation by Senate Republicans against the agreement Chuck Schumer reached with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin last week on spending measures that would lessen climate change. 

Senator Ted Cruz, who voted for the initial bill in June and switched his vote to “no,” was seen fist-bumping Montana Senator Steve Daines after the bill failed to pass last week, claimed the PACT Act was “part of out-of-control spending from the left” when interviewed at Reagan National Airport on his way home to Texas.  He was talking, of course, about the out-of-control spending he had voted for only a month previously. 

But never mind.  The whole thing amounts to a bunch of election-year grandstanding about the budget by the same Republicans who voted for the massive $1 trillion Trump tax cut that exploded the budget deficit back when they were in charge of spending.  The same thing happens every time a Republican is elected president and they control the House and Senate:  they blow up the deficit and saddle the next Democrat to take the White House with the consequences.

It's what the PACT Act is actually about that matters.  Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered from various diseases, from asthma to cancer, thought to be caused by exposure to toxic burn pits.  What is a burn pit?  It’s the result of a single stupid decision made by a general officer somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon that all units stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan had to burn the waste they produced so that secrets and military materiel couldn’t somehow fall into the hands of the enemy. 

Got that?  Soldiers were made to burn everything they threw away so some imaginary top secret plan to win the war wouldn’t accidentally be recovered by an Iraqi or Afghan citizen who happened upon a pile of military waste.  Why would such a foreign citizen have the opportunity to come across waste produced by American military units?  Because at every single base camp in Iraq and Afghanistan, locals were hired to do the Army’s and Air Force’s dirty work – clean office buildings, wash the dishes at dining facilities, fill Hesco barriers full of sand and gravel to make blast walls – all the shit work the Army was too busy winning the wars to do for itself.  There were so many Iraqi civilian workers at one brigade base camp I visited south of Mosul that they had to run shuttle buses around the base to get the workers to and from work.  I know, because I rode one of the buses with them to get back and forth from the dining facility, which was more than two miles from the tent where I slept at night.

The first base camp where I was embedded was that of an infantry company in the 101st Airborne Division. It was located in what had been an Iraqi Social Security office in downtown Mosul, a three-story building that held about 150 soldiers.  The building was surrounded on four sides by a hastily constructed concrete block wall – built by, yes, Iraqi civilians.  Just outside the front door of the building was the burn pit, and I mean just outside, only 10 or 15 feet away because the compound around the building was so small.  The pit smoldered day and night as everything from plastic water bottles, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, broken-down military gear of every conceivable kind, Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) containers both plastic and cardboard, food waste from fresh cooked food that we picked up at a brigade base camp for dinner, and all the other assorted crap that 150 young men produce as they live their lives and fight a war.  I even saw a 25 inch TV they used to play video games that had broken down in there one day, the whole thing burning from having had diesel fuel poured over it and ignited.

The word “toxic” does not begin to describe the smell.  The pit emitted thick, awful smoke day and night, wafting through open windows, hitting you in the face every time you walked out of the building to go on a patrol.  You couldn’t get away from it.  I saw a similar pit at another, even smaller, company base camp I stayed at on the Syrian border, and a third at a company base camp south of Mosul along the river.  The smoke from much, much larger burn pits could be seen blowing across every brigade base camp I visited as well.  Some of the brigade base camps had dozens of them burning 24 hours a day.

I asked several officers why they were burning all this toxic shit right next to where soldiers had to sleep and eat.  Every one of them shrugged.  It came down from “above,” one of them said.  “Just following orders.”

So just following the orders of some lunatic in the Pentagon who never even looked at one of the burn pits he ordered has caused thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to suffer from respiratory distress and lung disease and God only knows what else.  The burn pits are this generation’s Agent Orange. 

Just like in Vietnam, it was all done in our name, and we should pay for the hell we put them through until every single veteran of those two miserable wars is gone from the earth.