Senate bill seeks relief for cancer-stricken veterans deployed to toxic Uzbek base
The U.S. Senate introduced legislation Tuesday requiring the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide health care and benefits to service members who were deployed to a contaminated Uzbekistan base and now face cancers or other chronic illnesses.
The Senate bill marks an important next step for the veterans who served at Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or K2, a former Soviet base where U.S. troops were quickly sent in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks because it was located near Taliban and al Qaeda targets.
In December McClatchy reported that the military knew how bad the contamination was at K2 as early as October 2001, but still sent thousands of forces there.
K2 had remnants of depleted uranium and contamination from a former chemical weapons storage site. Now hundreds of service members who deployed there have reported various cancers, and they continue to struggle with getting the Department of Veterans Affairs to recognize their illnesses as connected to their time at the base.
“This bill will bring life-saving relief to hundreds – and potentially thousands – of veterans who were exposed to extremely harmful toxins in the black goo and glowing ponds reported at K2,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who introduced the legislation with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.
The cancers have hit members of the Army and Air Force special operations communities particularly hard.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rich Riddle deployed to K2 with the 8th Special Operations Squadron in 2003. He died in June of pancreatic cancer at the age of 63.
On Saturday, his widow and family buried him. Sunday would have been his 64th birthday.
“It was beautiful. Sad, but beautiful,” Daryl Riddle said of the military ceremony to honor her late husband’s life. “The hardest part was the flag, the reason for the folding of the flag and giving it to me.”
If the VA had alerted health care workers that K2 veterans may have a higher chance of cancer and should be screened, “maybe he would have had a fighting chance,” Daryl Riddle said.
Riddle’s pancreatic cancer was stage three by the time it was detected, she said.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed K2 legislation in its 2021 National Defense Authorization Act last month requiring the VA to launch a study of how many veterans who served at K2 are now sick. At the time, there was no complementary legislation in the Senate, which made it less likely K2 relief would be included in a final bill.
The Senate version goes farther than the House bill and would create a “presumption of service connection” for diseases that K2 veterans now face to help them qualify to have the VA cover their medical costs, Blumenthal and Baldwin said.
That “presumption of service” language is key for all K2 veterans still trying to get the VA to recognize their illnesses as service-connected.
When Rich Riddle learned earlier this year that Congress was considering legislation on K2, he said, “It won’t help me now,” Daryl Riddle recalled, because Rich knew his cancer was too advanced.
“What Rich thought at the time was, ‘I want to help other people,’ ” Daryl Riddle said.
The Senate bill also makes those K2 veterans eligible to record their exposure to toxic trash fires burned at the base in the VA burn pit registry. The registry was established to record how many veterans are sick who served at military bases across the Middle East where large open-fire trash bits burned human waste, computer parts, ammunition and other trash, releasing harmful particles into the air.
To date, the VA has not recognized Uzbekistan as a site with a burn pit even though early military studies identified burn pits at the base and projected as many as 75% of the forces who served at K2 would be exposed to toxic air.
“The Pentagon has known for years that our U.S. troops were exposed to cancer causing toxins while serving in Uzbekistan and it’s simply wrong for the VA to deny them health care and disability benefits,” Baldwin said in the statement.
The bill is supported by a variety of veterans groups who have banded together over the last year to get the government to take a more comprehensive approach to the hundreds of thousands of service members who’ve become sick because of contaminants they were exposed to during their military service.
This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 4:44 PM.
