Advocates Continue the Fight for Veterans Exposed to Toxic Burn Pits

Le Roy Torres remembers the air at Joint Base Balad in Iraq smelled like burning rubber. It felt as though he were “breathing in charcoal” while he was deployed there with the U.S. Army Reserve between 2007 and 2008.

The acrid fumes emerged from the vast garbage pit burning near his living quarters. Daily, the pit incinerated tons of waste, belching dark smoke over the military installation.

Torres began suffering from a dry cough, headaches and a severe upper respiratory infection while he was stationed there. After he returned home from the war, he was diagnosed with lung disease and a toxic brain injury. He calls what he and other veterans have experienced from their deployments a “huge invisible enemy that followed us home.”

“I noticed my lung capacity wasn’t the same when I came back. The red flags went up,” said Torres, a retired captain who completed much of his military training in Georgia at Fort Moore, then called Fort Benning.

The former Texas State Trooper and his wife, Rosie, created a nonprofit organization, Burn Pits 360. With fellow advocate John Feal and comedian Jon Stewart, they supported the passage of the 2022 PACT Act, a federal law that expands U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange and other toxic substances. The VA rejected many burn pit-related claims before the PACT Act.

Veterans and surviving relatives in Georgia have filed the fourth-highest number of benefits claims under the law at 96,165, according to VA data through Nov. 12. Only California, Florida and Texas had higher totals.

The largest number of Georgia’s claims have come from the coastal First Congressional District, where Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield and Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay are located.

So far through the 2022 law, the VA has approved 59,372 disability compensation claims from more than 51,000 veterans and surviving relatives residing in Georgia, totaling more than $332 million in benefits.

This year, the Biden administration announced it would add bladder and ureter cancer, multiple myeloma and leukemias to the list of conditions presumed to be related to toxic exposure under the law. There are already many other conditions on the list, including brain, kidney and pancreatic cancer; emphysema; and pulmonary fibrosis.

President Joe Biden has focused more attention on the issue by speculating whether his 46-year-old son’s death from brain cancer was linked to burn pits. Between 2008 and 2009, Beau Biden deployed with the Delaware National Guard to Iraq and spent time at Balad, the same base where Torres was stationed. Beau Biden, a Bronze Star Medal recipient, died in 2015 from glioblastoma multiforme.

“No one should be left behind,” Biden said in August on the law’s two-year anniversary, “if they were exposed to toxins and are experiencing health-related problems.”

Iraq’s Balad burn pit

The son of farmworkers, Torres was born and raised in the Corpus Christi, Texas, area. His late father, a U.S. Army veteran who served during the Korean War, became his childhood hero. Inspired by his dad, Torres joined the Texas National Guard at 17.

After graduating from high school and studying for a year at the University of Texas at Austin, Torres joined the U.S. Army and deployed to South Korea. Later, he signed up with the Army Reserve and served with the 402nd Army Field Support Brigade in Iraq between 2007 and 2008. He spent about a year at Joint Base Balad, a former Iraqi air base that became home to about 25,000 troops and civilians during the Iraq War.

To incinerate the many tons of waste created at Balad and other bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the Horn of Africa, the U.S. military set up scores of open-air burn pits. Many kinds of garbage went in them: Unexploded ordnance, metal cans, plastics, Styrofoam, paint, lubricants, even animal carcasses. The pits were supposed to be temporary until trash incinerators could be installed. But some pits continued operating until 2015.

The pit at Balad stretched across about 10 acres. Medical and human waste, rubber, solvents and other refuse were thrown inside it, doused with jet fuel and set afire. Military air tests at Balad revealed dioxins, compounds linked to some cancers.

Torres remembers the debris drifting off the burn pit coated his housing unit’s air conditioner and his nasal passages. To shield himself, Torres exercised indoors and slept with a sheet over his head. About midway through his deployment, he began waking up with headaches.

“I was a long-distance runner. I always exceeded standards with my physical fitness tests,” he said. “When I came home, it wasn’t the same anymore.”

Medical and legal odysseys

After his deployment to Iraq, Torres experienced more headaches as well as shortness of breath, difficulty concentrating, short-term memory loss, neuropathy and partial paralysis of his face, according to his medical records. He was frustrated when some doctors told him he was possibly experiencing anxiety or asthma.

“I was getting the runaround with what was wrong with me,” Torres said. “We were desperate to see if they could help me.”

Torres underwent a lung biopsy and was diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis in 2010. Three years later, he was medically discharged from the military. Five years after that, he was diagnosed with a brain injury called toxic encephalopathy. The year after that, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In all, Torres has visited medical facilities more than 450 times.

Torres said his ailments made him unable to resume his job as a Texas State Trooper, so he asked his employer to accommodate his condition by reemploying him in a different role, court records show. Texas refused. Torres sued in state court, saying he was improperly forced out of his job and alleging Texas violated a 1994 federal law meant to protect veterans from employment discrimination and to make reasonable accommodations for their disabilities.

The legal dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Torres’ favor in 2022, allowing his case to proceed. Last year, a Texas jury awarded Torres $2.49 million. In April, the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed court papers asking for a retrial.

Torres’ medical expenses drained his family’s savings. He also experienced a mental health crisis he attributes partly to his toxic brain injury. In 2016, he attempted suicide. Torres credits his late service dog, a German shepherd named Hope, with saving his life.

“I couldn’t take the pain anymore, emotionally and physically,” Torres said. “I was in so much pain from this crushing headache that night. I was like, ‘I am checking out. I can’t deal with this.’”

‘Making sure that history is not erased’

After Biden signed the PACT Act in 2022, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York recommended Le Roy and Rosie Torres, Stewart and Feal for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“Because of them, millions of Americans may have more precious time on this Earth with their loved ones,” Gillibrand wrote the president.

Le Roy and Rosie Torres are now working on a book and a documentary about their advocacy. They are also preparing to reach out to the incoming Trump administration, seeking to protect the PACT Act and improve how the VA provides health care.

A conservative policy blueprint called Project 2025 says the federal government “has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.” Organized by the Heritage Foundation and other right-leaning groups, the plan also says the next presidential administration should “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants.”

Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment. During the campaign, he repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, though some of its authors served in his previous administration. Trump has also picked some of the plan’s architects to serve in his cabinet, including Russell Vought. Trump wants Vought to lead the powerful Office of Management and Budget.

“We want to sit down with (Trump) to explain the history, the progress and the needs moving forward,” said Rosie Torres, executive director of Burn Pits 360. “This is about the warfighters and their families and making sure that history is not erased.”

Need help? Call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

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