U.S. Navy And Asbestos: Betrayal Of Our Heroes

It’s true that the United States Army, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps all used asbestos. Asbestos was used in the construction of military housing, in electrical insulation, and for brakes and clutches for tanks and aircraft and jeeps. It’s also true that a number of American soldiers suffered exposure to asbestos during their service time.

But the ships of the United States Navy and Coast Guard, with their miles of insulated piping, used far more asbestos than the other three branches of service combined. It was the American sailor who suffered the worst exposure to asbestos, and is paying the highest price now.

Ships that pass
By the Navy’s own definition, any ship built before 1980 is assumed to contain asbestos. It was required by their own specifications, issued in the days before World War II, even though Navy records show they knew of the hazards of asbestos even then.

Navy officials required that their ships be built using materials they knew to be hazardous to the health of the workers building them, not to mention dangerous to the sailors who would call those ships home.

When a World War II battleship fired its massive guns, bombarding a Nazi or Japanese shore installation, bits of asbestos insulation were shaken from the overhead piping.

Those guns subdued the enemy then. But the residue is killing our old heroes now.

The Navy doesn’t know and refuses to find out how many veterans have been injured or killed by asbestos. In November 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that people exposed to asbestos during their military service or in shipyard construction accounted for 26% of all mesothelioma victims, 16% of all other lung cancer victims, and 13% of all asbestosis victims.

Even a former chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., died of mesothelioma in 2000.

Nobody’s safe.

What can a veteran do?
Veterans have few recourses. Under American law, you can’t sue the government, no matter how badly they screwed up or how seriously they jeopardized your health.

All an injured veteran can do is apply through the Veterans’ Administration for benefits. It’s a hard road to travel, with or without an attorney helping you to file your claim. It can take years. Even then, less than one-third of all VA claimants actually receive benefits, even when it’s known they were exposed to asbestos during their service time.

To make his or her case and receive VA benefits for an asbestos-related disease, an injured veteran must prove two points. First, he has to prove that asbestos caused his injuries. His doctor’s diagnosis and medical records can prove this.

The hard part is for the veteran to prove that his asbestos-related injuries happened during his time in the service, and not at any other time before or since. Otherwise, the government assumes that veterans will recover for asbestos-related damages from the asbestos companies, the same way that everyone else does.

It’s a similar case to injuries caused by smoking, such as emphysema or lung cancer. If the veteran only smoked during her time in the service, and not before or afterwards, then her injuries can be described as service-related. But if she became addicted to smoking and continued the habit after her enlistment expired, the government assumes that her injuries were caused by the continued smoking. And they won’t pay.

Our greatest generation deserves better than this.