TYRONE, Ga. _ Tammy McCracken said her husband was fit and lean before he deployed to Iraq, a weightlifter and a runner with no history of serious illnesses.
But David returned home from Baghdad in 2009 with a persistent dry cough. Headaches came next. Then confusion, disorientation and memory loss. On the day he learned of his promotion to colonel in 2011, his doctors in Atlanta performed a biopsy and found a brain tumor. It would kill him in less than a year. He died at 46, leaving behind three children.
Tammy is certain of what caused his cancer _ the vast open-air burn pits the U.S. military used to eliminate all kinds of waste in Iraq. Everything went in them: unexploded ordnance, metal cans, plastics, Styrofoam, rubber, paint, lubricants, even body parts and animal carcasses. Ignited with jet fuel, the pits belched heavy smoke into the same air the soldiers breathed around their bases.
More than 170,000 troops and veterans who spent time in Iraq and elsewhere have added their names to a national government registry that tracks exposure to burn pits, oil well fires and other airborne hazards. As of Dec. 31, 7,255 Georgians were on the list. A nonprofit advocacy group that tracks the issue, Burn Pits 360, says it has tracked 130 deaths tied to burn pit exposure.
The Veterans Affairs Department has rejected most disability compensation claims to date. It points to a 2011 Institute of Medicine report that says insufficient data makes it impossible to conclude whether burn pit emissions could cause long-term health problems. But the VA says it continues to study the issue.
Several bills focusing on the issue are pending in Congress. Among them are measures that also would allow families of deceased veterans to participate in the government's airborne hazards registry and require the VA to create evaluation criteria for disability benefits for an illness often linked to burn pits, obliterative bronchiolitis. Meanwhile, Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, is planning to hold a hearing on exposures to burn pits and other toxic hazards this month.
Former Vice President Joseph Biden brought more attention to the issue last year, when he speculated whether his 46-year-old son's death from brain cancer was linked to burn pits. In 2009, Beau Biden deployed to Camp Victory in Iraq _ the same base where David McCracken was stationed _ before dying in 2015 from the same brain cancer that killed McCracken, glioblastoma multiforme.
Tammy McCracken's experience inspired her to volunteer with Burn Pits 360 and to enroll in a graduate analytics program at Georgia Tech. She hopes to use what she has learned and publish the locations of the military's burn pits. She also wants to help other families get the same VA indemnity compensation and education benefits her family received after nearly four years of appealing to the agency to link her husband's death to his military service.
"Why do we have to wait for symptoms to arise?" she said. "Why do we have to wait for a doctor to tell a family your husband has stage 4 cancer. It doesn't have to happen this way."
