CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, known as K2, in eastern Uzbekistan was central to the US Army invasion of Afghanistan during the years following the events of 9/11.
It has also been identified as the common denominator in a cluster of cancers and other chronic illnesses now endured by veterans at a rate five times their counterparts who deployed elsewhere.
Congressman Mark Green, R-Clarksville, is one of those K2 veterans, and he’s now working on bipartisan legislation in the House of Representatives to force the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense to recognize what his fellow veterans have endured.
K2 and Fort Campbell vets
Green served with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment as a flight surgeon during Operation Enduring Freedom. He was at the K2 base several times before his retirement from the Army in 2006.
The Fort Campbell-based 160th used K2 as the staging point for executing missions in Northern Afghanistan.
In 2015, nearly 10 years after Green’s last deployment to the Middle East, he was diagnosed with two types of cancers simultaneously: thyroid and colon cancers.
“My only experience at K2 was flying in and out, and into Afghanistan because it was early on in the war. The initial invasion was staged from there,” Green said. “But those guys, the 5th Special Forces Group, are probably the unit that is most affected.”
And he’s right. The majority of the soldiers deployed to K2 were from Fort Campbell, and 5th Group has had a higher incidence of cancer than regular Army battalions who were deployed to other bases.
One study concluded that veterans who were at K2 are five times – that’s 500% – more likely to develop cancer, and of the 10,100-plus servicemembers who were at K2, at least 75% will develop an illness related to exposure.
“Concentration-wise, this (Congressional) district would be the highest because the 160th and 5th Special Forces Group are here, and where do these guys retire? They retire here. 70% of them stay here, so the highest concentration in the country is probably my district,” Green said.
Connecting the dots
Green served three tours of duty: one in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. He was stationed at bases all over the Middle East, but due to the secretive nature of the 160th, those locations are classified.
“I really didn’t think about it at first because I had two primary cancers simultaneously. The chance of someone having a single cancer is pretty low. The chance of having two different cancers at the same time, with two different etiologies, is extremely rare, but I didn’t think anything of it until I went and did my genetic workup at Vanderbilt,” Green said.
According to that genetic testing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, he had no precursors for either cancers. That means both cancers likely have environmental causes.
Green, who is now in remission, began connecting his time overseas to possible exposures to environmental toxins. The possible sources vary widely. However, burn pits — the de facto method of waste disposal by military members overseas — is what Green believes caused his cancer.
“When I was in Baghdad, we would run on a treadmill right next to where they were keeping the detainees, and they would burn their feces; they’d burn trash, they’d burn everything in these burn pits. That aerosolized it, and I was breathing it in,” Green said.
According to 2019 reporting from Tara Copp of McClatchy DC, U.S. forces at K2 were exposed to multiple chemical and radiological hazards, such as “pond water that glowed green” and “black goo oozing from the ground.”
This past July, documents were declassified that show the DoD knew that K2 was home to a prior Soviet Union air base and missile storage facility.
In 1993, the site exploded due to fire, and numerous chemical and radiological hazards, including depleted uranium, chemical weapons, fuels and solvents, were dispersed into the soil. The DoD identified 392 unique toxic, chemical compounds that K2 veterans were exposed to from 2001-2006, according to the DoD documents.
Rectifying an oversight
Earlier this year, Green and Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Massachusetts, introduced the K2 Veterans Toxic Exposure Accountability Act in Congress.
The bill, HR 5957, would require the DoD to conduct its own epidemiological study of the environment at the overseas site. The bill would also create eligibility for K2 vets in the VA’s Burn Pits Registry, along with depleted uranium medical follow-up programs at the DoD and the VA.
It would also allow the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to access the studies conducted by VA and DoD.
Other House members suggested to Green and Lynch that they simply attach their bill to the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed in September. They did so, and the NDAA was passed in the House.
But after the NDAA got to the Senate, the key word “presumptive” was removed from the amendment pending the VA study. Senators were yet been convinced of the correlation between K2 and cancer, citing a need to do an environmental study first before allowing these illnesses to be considered contracted during service.
“What it does now is that when (the bill) passes the House and when it passes conference committee, it will do the investigation. It will create the report back to Congress, and then it’ll take more legislation for us to guarantee benefits from that,” Green said.
Frustration and waiting
Green said the bureaucracy of trying to assure that veterans receive benefits has been painstaking.
“The part that makes me upset is that we are going to delay another year at least the presumption piece. We had the language worded such that if the study is convincing, that they go ahead and automatically get presumption. Well, the Senate took that out,” Green said.
When asked about the precautions the DoD is taking to make sure that all servicemembers currently deployed are protected from exposure to the same toxins, Green couldn’t answer with confidence.
“I think so, but I’ve been gone a little while, so I don’t know what the current deployment logistical structure looks like,” Green said. “But I’m assuming so, because of the way the Army handled the initial report, it makes me think they learned their lesson and they want to make it go away.”
This is Part 1 in a two-part series. Coming up: Stories of the K2 veterans who have suffered and died from exposure.