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Dear Doug Collins

Janey Ensminger: Conceived in the Water's Reach, Dead at Nine, and the Name on the Law

Janey Ensminger never enlisted in anything. She was conceived in base housing, in December 1975, in a housing area called Tarawa Terrace, where the drinking water came from wells the federal government would later model as having carried a dry-cleaning solvent above today's federal safety limit for 346 months. She was diagnosed with leukemia at six and dead at nine, on September 24, 1985, and for twelve years her father — a career Marine drill instructor who had trained more than 2,000 recruits — had no answer to the only question he was asking. He got the first piece of it from a television newscast in 1997. This page is the record of her short life, of what was in the water while her mother carried her, of what the Marine Corps and the VA did and did not do afterward, and of the two statutes — the second still being fought over in federal court in October 2026 — that carry her name.

The service and the promise

Jerry Ensminger joined the Marine Corps in 1970, right out of high school — in his own account, angry over his brother having been shot in the head in Vietnam, and volunteering for a revenge he never got. What he got instead was a career — 24 and a half years, by his sworn congressional testimony — and a trade. He became a drill instructor, the Marine whose entire job is the Corps’ values stated out loud, every day, to each new platoon; the photograph on the poster of Semper Fi: Always Faithful is his graduation from Drill Instructor School at Parris Island on December 19, 1975. He trained more than 2,000 recruits, and by his own accounting lived at Camp Lejeune, across his postings, for almost twelve years.

The promise he worked under is the one printed in the Corps’ motto: Semper Fidelis, always faithful — the institution takes care of its own. A Marine family does not choose its housing, its hospital, or its water; it drinks what comes out of the taps the Corps provides, on the understanding that the institution is watching those things on the family’s behalf. The Ensmingers were posted to Camp Lejeune in 1973, and from 1973 to 1975 they lived in Tarawa Terrace, a base family-housing complex served by its own water treatment plant. What was in that water is now a matter of federal record. What the family knew at the time was nothing at all. Janey was the only one of the Ensmingers’ four children, her father testified to the Senate in 2015, “to have been conceived, carried, or born while we lived aboard Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune, NC during the years of contaminated water.” The precise geography matters on this page, because the shorthand version of her story — repeated by senators, news organizations, and even, in 2023, by her father’s own lawsuit — says she was “conceived and born at Camp Lejeune.” The detailed record, including her father’s own narration, says otherwise. The family stayed at Camp Lejeune until December 1975, when Janey was conceived. When they transferred out, her mother was three months pregnant; Janey had been carried through most of her first trimester at Tarawa Terrace. Jane Yoshi Ensminger — her mother, Etsuko, is Japanese — was born on July 30, 1976, in South Carolina, after the transfer. Her exposure, the exposure her father’s case has always rested on, was in utero: her mother drinking, cooking with, and bathing in Tarawa Terrace water through the first trimester, the window the federal health studies of Lejeune children would later focus on.

What happened

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the federal health agency that has studied Camp Lejeune since 1993, states its position in one paragraph:

“It is ATSDR’s position that past exposures from the 1950s through February 1985 to trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), vinyl chloride, and other contaminants in the drinking water at the Camp Lejeune likely increased the risk of cancers (kidney, multiple myeloma, leukemias, and others), adverse birth outcomes, and other adverse health effects of residents (including infants and children), civilian workers, Marines and Naval personnel at Camp Lejeune.”

The mechanics, from ATSDR’s historical reconstruction, divide the base in two. The Tarawa Terrace system — the Ensmingers’ system — was contaminated primarily with PCE, traced to waste-disposal practices at ABC One-Hour Cleaners, an off-base dry-cleaning firm; ATSDR’s modeling estimates PCE exceeded the current EPA maximum contaminant level of 5 parts per billion for 346 months between November 1957 and February 1987, at concentrations reaching roughly 200 parts per billion. The Hadnot Point system, serving the main side of the base, was contaminated primarily with TCE, along with PCE, benzene, and vinyl chloride, from leaking storage tanks, industrial spills, and waste sites; ATSDR estimates at least one contaminant exceeded its EPA limit from August 1953 to January 1985. The Marine Corps discovered volatile organic compounds in the water in 1982. The most contaminated wells were shut down in February 1985. CDC estimates put the exposed between 500,000 and one million across the contamination years, which the 2022 damages statute would fix as August 1, 1953 through December 31, 1987.

Janey’s illness sits inside that timeline with terrible precision. In July 1983, at six years old, she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. There was no history of cancer in either parent’s family — she was the only child in the family’s known history ever diagnosed with it. The family took her to Penn State University Medical Center and to Duke Children’s Hospital, searching, in her father’s words, for a cure and for answers; she endured, over nearly two and a half years, repeated bone marrow extractions and spinal taps. A week before the end, her father later told reporters, she told her aunt that she did not want to die — that she wanted to live longer, because she hoped to make a difference in the world. She died on September 24, 1985, in Durham, North Carolina, aged nine. Her parents divorced soon after. Her father was left with the question why — one the doctors, he has said, couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, and one that stayed with him for fourteen and a half years.

The answer arrived by accident, in 1997, twelve years after her death and three years after his retirement. Ensminger was living on a farm in eastern North Carolina — inside, as he later put it, the one media market where the story would be told. He was carrying a plate of food in for the evening news when the lead story reported that ATSDR had released its public health assessment for Camp Lejeune, and that the agency wanted to study the children exposed in utero for birth defects and childhood cancers — “primarily leukemia,” as he recalled it to Public Radio East in 2022. “I had a plate of spaghetti in my hand and when they said that I dropped it on my living room floor.” In the film he tells it the same way: “It was like God was saying to me, ‘Here is a glimmer of hope, that you will find your answer.’” He walked the farm that night to clear his head, and resolved to stop thinking only of Janey. “What about all these other people?” People who had done an enlistment or two and scattered home across the country, who had no reason ever to connect their cancers, or their children’s, to a base they had left decades before. Most of them, in 1997, had never been told anything. Neither, until that newscast, had he.

What the institution did afterward

The contamination was the institution’s. So was the silence that followed it, and the record of that silence is what Ensminger spent the rest of his life assembling.

Begin with what the institution knew and when. ATSDR dates the Marine Corps’ own discovery of volatile organic compounds in the water to 1982, and advocates’ document work, summarized in reporting on the documentary, shows base officials receiving repeated warnings between 1980 and 1984 that tests were finding toxic chemicals, including TCE, PCE, and benzene. The first contaminated well was not closed until late 1984, and then only after the co-owner of the outside laboratory that had run some of the tests notified North Carolina environmental officials; the most contaminated wells were shut down by February 1985. Even then, no one told the families. The first notification effort came in 1999 — fourteen years after the wells closed — as a byproduct of a federal health study of children conceived or born at the base between 1968 and 1985. A broader campaign began only in 2008, after Congress, lobbied by Ensminger, ordered one.

The federal health science, when it came, first came wrong. ATSDR’s 1997 public health assessment — the very document whose release put Ensminger on his farmhouse floor — concluded that adults who had drunk the water faced little increased risk. In 2009, under pressure from Ensminger and the community panel, ATSDR withdrew it, conceding it could “no longer stand behind the accuracy of the information in that document”; among its flaws, it had omitted benzene, found in a base well in 1984. Ensminger’s own document work surfaced more, including a 1981 document describing a radioactive-waste dump site near a base rifle range. The studies that replaced the withdrawn assessment took years more, because ATSDR’s water modeling had to be completed first. When the childhood study was finally released in December 2013 — surveying parents of 12,598 children born at Lejeune between 1968 and 1985 — it found elevated neural-tube-defect risk with first-trimester TCE and benzene exposure, and weaker associations between first-trimester PCE, vinyl chloride, or DCE exposure and childhood cancers such as leukemia: Janey’s disease, in the government’s own eventual science, carrying the weaker, harder-to-prove association.

Ensminger’s answer to the silence was procedure: documents, hearings, and a record no one could later say did not exist. With others — Major Tom Townsend, and later Mike Partain, the Lejeune-born fellow campaigner whose own page stands beside this one — he built The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten, a document-linked archive of the contamination. In June 2007 he testified at the House Science subcommittee hearing titled “Poisoned Patriots,” asking that the Corps “live up to their motto ‘Semper Fidelis.’” By September 2015 he was testifying for the seventh time. That appearance, five days after the thirtieth anniversary of Janey’s death, contains the sentence this page is built around: “When Janey was six years old she was diagnosed with Leukemia, she fought a valiant battle against her disease but she eventually lost the war, she passed away on 24 September 1985 at the age of nine… Janey is but one example of the multitude of tragedies suffered by former Camp Lejeune families who were exposed by this negligence.”

The campaign acquired a film. Semper Fi: Always Faithful, directed by Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon, premiered at Tribeca on April 21, 2011, won its documentary editing award and the 2012 Ridenhour Prize, was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and aired on MSNBC in February 2012. It follows Ensminger’s investigation, with Partain beside him, and its argument is the one he had been making in hearing rooms for a decade: the Corps had known its water was poisoned, and the motto was therefore a debt. Congress hosted a Capitol Hill screening in June 2011. On May 5, 2011, Representative Brad Miller had introduced H.R. 1742, the Janey Ensminger Act.

What Congress passed, fifteen months later, was that bill folded into a larger veterans’ law. The House passed the measure on July 31, 2012, the day after what would have been Janey’s thirty-sixth birthday. “Well, I know she’s watching,” Ensminger said that day, in the Stars and Stripes account. “And by God, she’s made more of a change in this world through her death than most people make in their entire lives.” On August 6, 2012, President Obama signed the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012 (Public Law 112-154) in the Oval Office, with Ensminger and Partain standing beside him. Its Lejeune title is the Janey Ensminger Act. “Sadly, this act alone will not bring back those we’ve lost, including Janey Ensminger,” the President said, “but it will honor their memory by making a real difference for those who are still suffering.”

The statute’s terms were exact, and narrower than its name. For a veteran or family member who had resided at Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days during the covered years, VA would provide hospital care and medical services for any of 15 covered conditions: bladder cancer, breast cancer, esophageal cancer, female infertility, hepatic steatosis, kidney cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, miscarriage, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndromes, neurobehavioral effects, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, renal toxicity, and scleroderma. For veterans the care came without copayment; for family members, VA stood as payer of last resort. What the Act did not provide was compensation — no disability payments, no damages for the deaths, no day in court. It was care, not compensation, and for a family like the Ensmingers, whose loss was a dead child rather than a treatable diagnosis, it provided acknowledgment and almost nothing else. The courthouse stayed closed: families who sued still faced sovereign immunity and North Carolina’s ten-year statute of repose, which had run out long before most of the cancers appeared, and in 2014 the Supreme Court’s decision in CTS Corp. v. Waldburger left that bar standing.

Ensminger went back to the hearing rooms. His argument now was that even the 2012 care was being administered against the science: VA staff were deciding which Lejeune diseases counted, while ATSDR — the agency Congress created and funded to do exactly that work — had found links VA would not recognize. The Janey Ensminger Act of 2016 (S. 2888), introduced by Senators Richard Burr, Thom Tillis, and Bill Nelson, would have required VA to provide care for every disease ATSDR could scientifically link to the exposure, with ATSDR reviewing the literature every three years so coverage would follow the evidence. Ensminger testified for it in May 2016. It was reintroduced in 2017 and again in 2019, with a widening bipartisan list of sponsors. None of the three versions was enacted. In 2017 VA did finalize a rule granting presumptive disability benefits for eight Lejeune-linked conditions — but to veterans only. Family members, the Janeys and the children like her, were not veterans, and the rule was not for them. Care without compensation in 2012; compensation for veterans without their families in 2017; an unenacted science bill three times running. What the institution had not produced, thirty years after the wells closed, was a route by which the family of a dead nine-year-old could be heard on the merits.

That route came, at last, from a different vehicle. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act was carried for years as standalone legislation — Ensminger among those who pushed it — before it was folded, as Section 804, into the PACT Act. Ensminger stood on the East Room stage on August 10, 2022, when President Biden signed it (Public Law 117-168), and published a commentary in the Air Force Times the same day: “For nearly three decades, enlisted servicemen and women, their families and on-base staff drank, bathed and cooked with water containing known carcinogens, up to 280 times the standard safety limits… Until now, the government has skirted responsibility.” The Justice Act waived the government’s immunity, displaced the statute of repose, and let anyone who resided, worked, or was otherwise exposed — including in utero — for at least 30 days between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987, file an administrative claim with the Department of the Navy and then, if the claim was denied or left unresolved for six months, sue the United States in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, under an “at least as likely as not” causation standard. The window to file ran two years.

On February 11, 2023, Jerome M. Ensminger filed his. The complaint, in the Eastern District of North Carolina (No. 4:23-cv-00030-M), was brought by Ensminger as administrator of the Estate of Jane Ensminger — he had taken out letters of administration in Onslow County in May 2022 — and it alleged what he had been saying since 1997: that Jane Ensminger’s acute lymphocytic leukemia was caused by Camp Lejeune’s contaminated tap water, to which, the complaint states, she was exposed for not less than thirty days within the statutory window. The man whose daughter’s name was on the 2012 act had finally been given the thing that act withheld: a damages claim, in his daughter’s name, against the United States.

Where it stands now

The filing window closed in August 2024. By then the Navy had received roughly 408,500 administrative claims, and about 3,800 lawsuits had been filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Ensminger’s among them. No Camp Lejeune case has been tried to a verdict. The litigation has instead moved on two tracks: a court-supervised push toward a global settlement, and the Navy and Justice Department’s Elective Option program, a fixed-grid settlement track begun in 2023 that pays by diagnosis and duration of exposure.

The government’s own autumn 2026 numbers describe a remedy reaching a small fraction of the people the statute addressed. As of September 14, 2026, Elective Option offers approved totaled about $1.084 billion, with $872.25 million paid — against more than 400,000 administrative claims, most of which the government says lack sufficient documentation to qualify. Ensminger and Partain made the pace argument in March 2026, on Public Radio East, answering a Justice Department announcement touting roughly 2,500 approved offers totaling about $708 million since 2023: the Associate Attorney General’s regret that veterans had waited so long was, Ensminger said, “just an out-and-out lie,” because “it was his own Department of Justice, the environmental branch, that has been filing motion after motion, hundreds of motions on this case to slow it down to a slow crawl.” Partain computed the Navy’s rate at about two and a half offers a day — “it’ll be about 429 years before the Navy gets through all these claims.” A running fight over “offsets” — whether a court award must be reduced by VA, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits received or expected — consumed much of 2026, and the correction bill retained bipartisan backing without moving.

The court’s own calendar is the sharpest statement of where the case stands. In a June 30, 2026 order, the four judges of the Eastern District directed both sides to use their best efforts to reach a global settlement by October 30, 2026. In a September 29, 2026 order, the court found that its pressure “has had the desired effect” and that “progress toward a global settlement is being made,” and kept the October 30 date and the mandatory weekly meetings with the court’s settlement masters. As of this writing in mid-October 2026, no global settlement has been announced. The first bench trials — there is no jury under the Justice Act — were set in the Track 1 kidney-cancer cases for late October and November 2026. Ensminger, in a newspaper account earlier in 2026, was already counting the slippage out loud: the trials were going to begin in the summer of 2023, “then maybe 2024. Then it became 2025 and now here we are in 2026.” He had said a version of the same thing at the litigation’s first hearing in April 2023: “Holy heck, it’s already been 26 years for me… I would like to see this stuff get resolved sooner rather than later.”

No resolution of Ensminger’s own lawsuit — the estate’s claim for Janey — has been reported as of October 2026; it sits inside the mass litigation his campaign created. The other open item is the same item in another form: people diagnosed after the August 2024 window closed, or who never learned of it in time, for whom, as Ensminger put it in March 2026, “there is no current recourse… It’s just a shame.” He is, by Public Radio East’s March 2026 count, twenty-nine years into the fight that began with a dropped plate of spaghetti. Janey Ensminger would have turned fifty on July 30, 2026. The law with her name on it is fourteen years old. The damages claim with her name on it is three years old and untried.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Janey Ensminger’s case was carried on video three ways: by her father, testifying to the Senate in his daughter’s name — twice, in 2015 and 2016, as the follow-on bills bearing her name were heard; and by the documentary that took his investigation to Tribeca and an Academy Award shortlist. Three films, in that order.

The testimony, 2015. Ensminger before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee on September 29, 2015, five days after the thirtieth anniversary of Janey's death. (Linked by Sen. Thom Tillis's office; embedded under this heading by the Marine Corps Reserve Association.)

The film. The trailer for Semper Fi: Always Faithful (2011), the documentary following Ensminger's — and Mike Partain's — campaign. (tiedtracks, the filmmakers' channel.)

The testimony, 2016. Ensminger's full testimony in support of S. 2888, the Janey Ensminger Act of 2016. (Linked as his full testimony by Sen. Thom Tillis's office.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.