Don’t worry. The Va says it’s ok.

What we walked past, what we drank, what we breathed, and what happened to some of the people who served at Field Station Kunia

I served at Field Station Kunia in Hawaii from 1989 to 1993.

I worked inside an underground military facility beneath the pineapple fields of central Oahu.

I drank the water. I breathed the air. I walked through those tunnels every day.

And decades later, I find myself doing something I never imagined I would have to do: scouring old government reports, environmental databases, contracts, cleanup records and forgotten documents trying to determine what the United States government exposed us to while we were simply doing our jobs.

This isn’t an abstract environmental story to me.

I was there.

I Became Seriously Ill While I Was There

During my assignment at Kunia, I drank untreated water from a hose at the station.

I became violently ill.

It was serious enough that I was transported by ambulance to Tripler Army Medical Center and admitted.

That happened while I was stationed there. It wasn’t something I remembered decades later after reading about TCE, pesticides or contaminated groundwater.

I lived it.

At the time, however, I didn’t know about TCE.

I didn’t know about EDB, DBCP, TCP or the other chemicals associated with decades of pineapple agriculture around Kunia.

I didn’t know what was in the transformers inside the tunnel.

I didn’t know why contractors were doing some of the environmental cleanup work I saw.

We weren’t told.

We were soldiers.

We did our jobs.

And we did them well.

We Walked Past the PCB Cleanup Carrying Our Food

One of my clearest memories involves the PCB cleanup inside the tunnel.

This wasn’t a contaminated site miles away from where we worked.

It was where we worked.

I remember contractors performing cleanup wearing hazardous-material protective equipment.

And I remember us walking right past them.

Sometimes we were carrying open food trays.

Think about that for a moment.

The people performing the cleanup were wearing protective equipment because of whatever they were handling or disturbing.

Meanwhile, soldiers working inside the facility continued walking through the area as part of our normal routine.

There was also a fan associated with the work area blowing air toward areas used by personnel.

Nobody stopped us and explained the potential exposure.

Nobody told us not to carry food through there.

Nobody sat us down and explained what PCBs could potentially do to the human body.

Today we know much more about PCBs.

Exposure can occur through contaminated material, ingestion and inhalation. Long-term PCB exposure has been associated with concerns involving cancer and effects on the immune, neurological, reproductive, developmental and endocrine systems.

That doesn’t prove that walking past that cleanup caused someone’s cancer.

But it makes a very obvious question worth asking:

Why were the people cleaning it up wearing protective equipment while the soldiers working there were apparently allowed to walk past it carrying open food?

Government records make this memory even more significant.

The environmental history of Kunia documents PCB contamination, and records describe the removal of 15 approximately 30-year-old transformers from inside the tunnel complex in 1991.

I was there in 1991.

So now I want the original records.

Which transformers contained PCBs?

Had any leaked?

What concentrations were measured?

Where were they located?

What air sampling was performed?

What wipe sampling was performed?

What protective measures were required?

What did the cleanup contractors know that we didn’t?

Those answers should exist somewhere.

Then There Was the Helipad

The tunnel wasn’t the only place where we spent our time.

We conducted PT, formations and fire drills around the helipad. Not every day but enough.

We stood there.

We exercised there.

We assembled there.

And dust blew through the area and past us.

Today, knowing what has subsequently been documented and investigated around Field Station Kunia, that dust takes on an entirely different significance.

If contaminated soil or particulate matter was present, blowing dust creates a potential exposure pathway through inhalation, ingestion of deposited particles, and material settling onto skin, clothing and equipment.

Again, I am not claiming that every cloud of dust contained a particular chemical.

I am saying something much simpler:

We were repeatedly placed in an environment where the contents of that dust now deserve to be known.

Where are the historical soil samples?

Where are the helipad sampling records?

Where are the environmental surveys?

Where are the pesticide records for the fields surrounding us?

Where are the records showing whether PCBs, fuels, metals, pesticides or other contaminants were present in the soil and dust during the years we stood there?

The Walls Were Wet

Kunia was underground.

The concrete walls were frequently wet or damp to the touch.

There wasn’t simply an occasional moisture problem.

Moisture was part of the environment.

There were also multiple cave-in occurrences during my time there.

There was considerable cleanup and work occurring around the facility while I was stationed there.

But there was very little explanation given to us about what was being cleaned up, what had been discovered or whether any of it presented a health concern.

We simply continued working.

The damp conditions matter because moisture and inadequate ventilation can create conditions favorable to mold and microbial growth.

Damp and mold-contaminated buildings are associated with respiratory symptoms and can worsen or contribute to asthma and allergic or inflammatory respiratory problems.

And our exposure to those conditions wasn’t necessarily limited to the tunnel.

Then We Went Home to A-Quad

When we weren’t working at Kunia, some of us were housed at A-Quad at Schofield Barracks.

There were mold and moisture issues there as well.

So consider what an ordinary day could look like.

You could spend your working hours inside a damp underground facility and then return to military housing where you could encounter another damp or mold-prone environment.

That matters when trying to reconstruct someone’s total exposure.

Environmental exposure doesn’t care whether the government puts one building in one administrative file and another building in a different file.

Your lungs don’t reset when you leave work.

And Then There Was the Water

Water may be one of the most important parts of this story.

We drank it.

We washed with it.

We used it every day.

In my case, I drank untreated water from a hose at Kunia and became sick enough to be transported by ambulance and hospitalized.

Years later, government environmental records establish that TCE contamination existed in the Schofield groundwater system.

Treatment was necessary.

A historical Army sampling result we’ve located was 5.3 parts per billion of TCE.

The federal drinking-water Maximum Contaminant Level for TCE is 5 ppb.

That doesn’t mean one glass of water at 5.3 ppb would normally cause acute TCE poisoning.

But that’s not the important point.

It demonstrates that the groundwater contamination was real.

And TCE wasn’t the only groundwater problem in the wider Kunia area.

Decades of pineapple agriculture left a documented legacy involving fumigants and pesticides including EDB, DBCP and related chlorinated chemicals.

There was a major pesticide spill near a Kunia drinking-water well.

But later government documentation makes another important point:

The contamination wasn’t necessarily just the result of that one accident.

Historical legal application of agricultural chemicals also contributed to background contamination in the area.

So the question isn’t:

Was there contamination around Kunia?

There was.

The question is:

What reached us?

The People I Knew

This is where the story stops being about environmental reports.

I know people who served in this community who later developed cancers and tumors.

Different cancers.

Different tumors.

Different serious illnesses.

And some of those people have died.

These weren’t entries in a spreadsheet.

They were people I knew.

They had families.

They served their country.

Some aren’t here anymore to ask these questions themselves.

I’m not going to tell you that someone’s cancer automatically proves Kunia caused it.

Cancer doesn’t work that way. Establishing environmental causation requires medical evidence, exposure reconstruction and good science.

But something else is equally important:

The illnesses among Kunia veterans are not something I invented.

In 2021, the Hawaii Legislature formally recorded concerns that veterans who served at Kunia had developed cancer, neurological conditions, dementia and other chronic illnesses.

That isn’t an epidemiological study and it doesn’t prove causation.

But it does establish that the illnesses being reported among Kunia veterans became serious enough to enter the official public record.

And some of those veterans are now dead.

The One Time Someone Mentioned Future Health Consequences

Perhaps the strangest part of my memory from Kunia is this:

For all the cleanup work, all the moisture, all the environmental activity and everything else happening around us, I don’t remember anyone sitting us down and explaining that we might be facing long-term health risks.

There was one exception.

Someone came around asking us to sign a document.

My recollection is that the document essentially said we would not sue.

Most of us didn’t sign it.

I personally don’t know anyone who did.

I have been searching for that document ever since this investigation began.

Other former personnel remember it as well, but until we recover the actual document or independent government records referring to it, I am presenting this for exactly what it is:

my firsthand recollection.

But if that document is eventually found, I want to know something very important:

What happened that made someone believe such a document was necessary?

The Worst-Case Possibility

The worst-case scenario isn’t that there was one bad chemical at Kunia.

It’s that there wasn’t just one.

Imagine spending years in an underground facility where several potential exposure pathways overlap:

TCE and other volatile chemicals in groundwater.

Pineapple fumigants and pesticides in the surrounding environment.

PCB-containing equipment and contamination.

Lead and other metals.

Fuel-related contamination.

Contaminated dust.

Persistent moisture and mold.

Environmental cleanup occurring while the facility remained occupied.

And potentially contaminated water being used for drinking, washing and other everyday activities.

If several of those pathways operated simultaneously, studying each chemical in isolation could miss what the soldiers actually experienced.

We lived in the combined environment.

And the Best-Case Possibility

There is another possibility, and the records should be capable of establishing it.

Perhaps most of the safeguards worked.

Perhaps contaminated water was treated effectively before reaching us.

Perhaps PCB contamination remained localized.

Perhaps the dust around the helipad contained nothing at concentrations that presented a meaningful health risk.

Perhaps agricultural contamination didn’t significantly reach the places where we worked.

Perhaps ventilation kept airborne exposures low.

Perhaps the illnesses that developed among Kunia veterans were largely unrelated to their service there.

If that’s what happened, show us the records.

Show us the original laboratory results.

Show us the air monitoring.

Show us the transformer testing.

Show us the PCB sampling.

Show us the drinking-water records.

Show us the pesticide application records.

Show us the soil samples from around the helipad.

Show us the industrial-hygiene reports.

Show us the ventilation studies.

Show us what was happening during the cleanup operations.

And show us that document we remember being asked to sign.

We Did Our Job

This may be the part that bothers me most.

We did our job.

We did it well.

We weren’t environmental scientists.

We weren’t toxicologists.

We weren’t industrial hygienists.

We were soldiers.

We had every reason to believe that if something in our workplace represented a serious health risk, someone responsible for our safety would tell us.

Instead, decades later, the reward has been that we have had to scour the internet ourselves looking for evidence of what happened to us.

Old EPA records.

Army cleanup reports.

Hawaii environmental documents.

Superfund files.

Old contracts.

Archived engineering records.

Water-well reports.

Legislative records.

Documents scattered across government databases that most veterans would never even know existed.

Piece by piece, we’re reconstructing the environment we served in.

And every new document seems to create another question.

Don’t Worry, the VA Says It’s OK

That’s why I chose this title.

Because after everything we’ve found, reassurance isn’t enough.

I don’t want someone to tell me not to worry.

I want the records.

I want to know what was in those transformers.

I want to know what was in the dust blowing past us at the helipad.

I want to know what was in our drinking water.

I want to know what was being cleaned up while we walked past carrying our food.

I want to know what was applied to the pineapple fields above us.

I want to know why the walls were constantly damp.

I want to know what environmental testing was being performed while we were there.

And I want to know why someone apparently thought it was important enough to ask soldiers to sign something saying they wouldn’t sue.

Most importantly, I want to know whether any of this helps explain why people I served with developed cancers, tumors and other serious diseases — and why some of them aren’t here anymore.

Maybe the complete record will eventually show that our exposure was limited.

Maybe it won’t.

But after everything we’ve uncovered, one thing seems very clear to me:

We deserve the complete record.

Not summaries.

Not reassurance.

Not another website telling veterans everything was probably fine.

The original records. The original test results. The original laboratory data.

We served there.

We lived it.

And the people who are still here shouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives searching the internet to find out what they were exposed to