A FEW GOOD MEN, TOO MANY CHEMICALS

Toxic Exposure of U.S. Marines, Murder and Government Cover-up

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(SALEM) - A Few Good Men, Too Many Chemicals is a thrilling and informative nonfiction account of contamination at two Marine Corps installations, former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro on the West Coast (CA) and Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune on the East Coast (NC). The book is co-authored by two former MCAS El Toro Marines, Tim King, photojournalist and war correspondent, and Bob O’Dowd, Salem-News investigative reporter.

A Few Good Men, Too Many Chemicals tells the story of the thousands of veterans and their families, once stationed at these hazardous military installations, who have continued to be ignored by the U.S. government by denial of the effects of exposure to environmental hazards, including the highest incidence at Camp Lejeune of male breast cancer in any other demographic in the U.S. King and O’Dowd hope to change the course of a government that chooses to ignore affected veterans until death silences their pleas for assistance. Both bases are Superfund sites. Many affected veterans have died without ‘connecting the dots’ between their diseases and military service. Several bills are pending in Congress to provide health care to Camp Lejeune veterans, but the pressure to find offsets in Defense Department programs to fund the health care and the government’s debt crisis may doom all of them.

A Few Good Men, Too Many Chemicals includes the story of the murder of Marine Colonel James E. Sabow whose death has been tied to use of El Toro assets during the 1980s and 1990s to transport cocaine into the U.S and to export guns to the Contra Rebel faction of Nicaragua. Colonel Sabow was found dead in his quarters by his wife on January 22, 1991. The circumstances surrounding his death and the forensic evidence from the crime scene support murder. The NCIS and the Orange County coroner report suicide as the manner of death. The purging of a key data processing file lead to the death of Colonel Sabow and placed a cloud of suspicion over the base’s senior leadership. Staff Sgt. Tom Wade, the one Marine with the data processing expertise to purge a key data processing file, was transferred to another base in Florida and murdered several years later. His death remains a cold case.

A Few Good Men, Too Many Chemicals reports on a pattern of missing (negligence, shredded, purged or trashed come to mind as possibilities) records related to MCAS El Toro’s environmental contamination. This pattern suggests an effort to hide the truth of MCAS El Toro's environmental contamination from veterans, their dependents, and the public. These include no usage records on TCE and other organic solvents used on the base for decades; the Marine Corps denial of ownership of the TCE plume spreading into Orange County until a lawsuit was filed by regulatory authorities; loss of the official government contract file with Irvine Ranch Water District and the technical justification for the latest municipal water purchase; loss of all of the original well construction drawings; over 40 years of water distribution engineering drawings missing; no records on the dates the base wells were abandoned but some may have been in production when the TCE plume was found off base in 1985, followed by the redrawing of the water distribution drawings in 1986; a Navy inspection in 1998 found more than 40 feet of a well screen opened in the contaminated aquifer followed by the sealing of all Navy wells in concrete without a physical inspection; and dioxin reported by the State of California’ website but not the Navy and EPA.

The book is available in digital format from Amazon’s Kindle.

Email contacts are: Tim King, newsroom@salem-news.com and Robert O’Dowd, rodowd@live.com.