BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

The Qarmat Ali Veterans: They Guarded the Plant, and Breathed What Was Blowing Off Its Ground

They were sent to protect other people while those people worked. From April through September 2003, Army National Guard soldiers from Oregon, West Virginia, Indiana, and South Carolina — joined by other U.S. soldiers and British RAF personnel — guarded the contractors restoring the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant in the Basrah oil fields of Iraq, a plant whose ground and air carried sodium dichromate, the orange-yellow source of hexavalent chromium, a known lung carcinogen. The soldiers testified they were told the dust was a mild irritant. What followed is the documented record: Senate hearings in 2008 and 2009, an inspector general's finding that the contractor had not fully complied with its contract's safety standards, an $85.2 million Oregon jury verdict in 2012, its vacatur in 2015 because Oregon had no jurisdiction over the contractor, the dismissal of the re-filed Texas case in 2017, and a VA surveillance program that monitors these veterans without presuming any illness is connected to the plant. This page is that record.

The service and the promise

Qarmat Ali was not a battlefield objective. It was Iraq’s oil infrastructure: a water treatment and injection plant near Basrah where, as the VA records, water from the Tigris River was injected into the ground to drive oil to the surface. Before the war, the Iraqis who ran it treated that water with sodium dichromate to prevent corrosion of pipelines, pumps, and equipment. Restoring it was part of restoring Iraqi oil production, and in March 2003 the Army contracted Kellogg Brown and Root — KBR — to restore the Rumaylah oil fields under Project RIO, Restore Iraqi Oil.

The soldiers’ part was force protection. The VA’s examiner fact sheet states it plainly: from approximately April through September 2003, Guard personnel from Indiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Oregon operated at the plant, and “they were assigned to guard contract workers who were restoring the plant.” The VA’s history adds the rotation: Oregon and West Virginia soldiers escorted contractors first, on day trips from Kuwait; Indiana and South Carolina soldiers were then added and eventually replaced them. British RAF personnel performed the same duty at the same plant, and some later joined the American litigation.

The promise in such a mission is narrow and sharp: a soldier ordered to guard a work site is entitled to assume its hazards have been assessed by the people paid to assess them — that if the ground is contaminated, someone will tell him, equip him, and take his symptoms seriously. The Qarmat Ali record is the record of that promise failing at all three points.

What happened

The plant had been looted and vandalized after the invasion, and the VA records that pre-war operations and post-war vandalism left sodium dichromate contamination in parts of the facility, where the chemical had been stored in bags. Russell Powell, a former West Virginia Guard staff sergeant and battalion medic, described the scene to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on August 3, 2009: a building containing thousands of 100-pound bags of the chemical had had its roof stripped off, and the top layers of the bags were ripped open, exposing the orange powder to the wind.

The soldiers’ testimony — attributed here to the men who gave it, before Congress and under oath — is consistent across states and years. They said the orange dust covered the site, blew in windstorms, and got on their clothes, skin, and food; that they slept on it and used the bags as sandbags in weapons training; that nosebleeds, rashes, and breathing trouble began quickly — Powell testified he developed rashes within three days of arriving in April 2003; and that when they asked, they were told it was a minor irritant, or sand. Russell Kimberling, the Indiana Guard company commander, testified KBR told his company its risk assessment required no protective equipment, and his men were never told to wear masks or chemical gear; Kimberling was medically evacuated after developing a perforation in his nose, a “chrome hole” said to be a telltale sign of the exposure. Rocky Bixby, the Oregon Guard staff sergeant who became the named plaintiff in Bixby, testified no one from KBR or the Army ever told his soldiers about hazardous materials at the facility. And Kimberling testified the first protective equipment he saw was worn by civilians, who stepped from their vehicles in August 2003 in white suits no one had issued, or mentioned, to the soldiers guarding them.

The institutional timeline is slower than the symptoms. The VA records that general awareness of the chemical came around June 2003, mitigation began that month, and official remediation began August 18, 2003, continuing into October. Not until September 19, 2003, were coalition soldiers restricted from the site without the Command Surgeon’s permission; not until October 17 were they barred from parts of the plant and mandated protective equipment there. The Inspector General later measured the cost of that pace: because KBR “did not fully comply with occupational safety and health standards required” under its contract, “a greater number of Service members and DoD civilian employees were exposed to sodium dichromate, and for longer periods” — nearly 1,000 people, over five months.

KBR’s position must be recorded as the company stated it: its conduct was governed by its contract; once the contamination was found, it notified the Army and helped clean up the site; Army officers testified it communicated openly about the risks; and the soldiers’ symptoms were, in its witnesses’ account, desert air and pre-existing conditions, or exposures too brief to cause serious harm. The Army’s medical position is likewise part of the record: its preventive medicine center evaluated soldiers in fall 2003, and in November 2008 the Defense Health Board concurred — no findings pointing specifically to excessive acute exposure, and no elevated risk of future adverse effects for those evaluated. The Army Public Health Center maintains that position, acknowledging uncertainty about levels before the October 2003 assessments. Against it stands Dr. Herman Gibb, a former EPA senior science advisor, who told the Senate the reported symptoms are consistent with significant exposure, and estimated exposures, as Government Executive reported, at 80 to 200 times the federal occupational limit.

One name belongs here rather than in a footnote. Lieutenant Colonel James Gentry of the Indiana National Guard commanded at Qarmat Ali. He died of lung cancer in 2009. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion records the Army’s own determination in his case: his death was deemed “In Line of Duty for Exposure to Sodium Dichromate between June – September 2003.” In Gentry’s individual case, the Army said the line plainly, about its own officer.

What the institution did afterward

The first response was medical, and partial. The VA records screenings of 129 Indiana Guard soldiers and 10 Corps of Engineers personnel between September 30 and November 2, 2003, and questionnaires to 52 Oregon and 53 South Carolina soldiers no longer at the site. The soldiers’ complaint, pressed for years, was that this reached only some of them, that later testing could not measure what they had breathed in the spring, and that most were never told what they had been exposed to. The broad notification — the Army and VA tracking the veterans down — came in 2009, six years later. Roughly 1,000 servicemembers had potentially been exposed; about 600 were Guard members from the four states, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki told Senator Dorgan on October 8, 2009, and those veterans would receive an annual examination, including a chest radiograph every five years.

Congress forced much of that pace. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee, chaired by Senator Dorgan, examined KBR’s role on June 20, 2008, and returned on August 3, 2009, to the Army’s response, hearing Powell, Bixby, and Kimberling and Dr. Gibb. On August 11, 2009, Dorgan and six other senators — Byrd and Rockefeller of West Virginia, Bayh of Indiana, Wyden and Merkley of Oregon, and Whitehouse of Rhode Island — formally asked the Defense Department’s Inspector General for a general investigation, writing that they believed the conduct or inaction of KBR and the Army may have caused hundreds of troops to be exposed. Bayh, whose state had up to 142 Guard members affected, pressed the Indiana case separately. The Inspector General’s work produced the September 2011 report quoted above.

Legislation was attempted and not enacted. On March 19, 2009, Senators Bayh, Dorgan, and Wyden introduced S. 642, the Health Care for Members of the Armed Forces Exposed to Chemical Hazards Act of 2009. It would have established registries, guaranteed VA care for the exposed, and shifted the burden of proof to the government. It was referred to committee, did not become law, and no Qarmat Ali presumption followed.

What the VA built instead was surveillance without presumption. Under the Qarmat Ali Medical Surveillance Program, veterans who served at the plant may receive free screenings — a physical examination emphasizing ears, nose and throat, lungs, and skin, and pulmonary function tests. VA’s benefits arm issued examiners a fact sheet headed “VBA Considers this Veteran Exposed to Hexavalent Chromium”: for veterans of the four Guard states’ units at the plant in April–September 2003, exposure is established. But exposure established is not disability presumed; a claim for a particular condition is still decided individually. The VA states it does not expect to find many serious Qarmat Ali-related illnesses, and its 2016 Military Medicine review of registry examinations of 124 veterans reported no abnormalities specific to chromium exposure.

The other forum was the courts, and the soldiers went there state by state — why this page does not merge the cohorts. Sixteen Indiana Guardsmen sued first, in December 2008, in the case that became McManaway v. KBR in Houston. The Oregon Guardsmen filed separately on June 8, 2009: Bixby v. KBR, Inc., No. 3:09-cv-00632, named for Rocky Bixby, pleading negligence and fraud. Twelve Oregon plaintiffs — Jason Arnold, Rocky Bixby, Ronald Bjerklund, Colt Campredon, Charles Ellis, Byron Greer, Matthew Hadley, Brian Hedin, Vito Pacheco, Lawrence Robelia, Charles Seamon, and Aaron St. Clair — were tried first, as bellwethers, from October 9 to November 2, 2012. The verdict must be stated exactly, because it is often stated wrong: the jury found the defendants not liable on the fraud claims, and liable in negligence, finding KBR had acted with reckless and outrageous indifference to a highly unreasonable risk of harm. It awarded each of the twelve $850,000 in noneconomic damages ($10.2 million) and $6.25 million each in punitive damages ($75 million): $85.2 million in all. Judge Papak found a preponderance of the trial evidence established that the defendants affirmatively misrepresented the extent of the risk to the plaintiffs and their chain of command — findings within the negligence case, not a fraud verdict. In April 2013 he reduced each noneconomic award to $500,000, entering final judgment at $81 million. KBR had said it would appeal, that the verdict bore no rational relationship to the evidence, and that it had done safe, professional work. On appeal the case turned on a question raised at the start: whether Oregon’s courts had power over it at all.

Where it stands now

On May 14, 2015, the Ninth Circuit issued a memorandum disposition in Bixby v. KBR, Inc., 603 F. App’x 605, reversing the judgment. It held KBR was not subject to personal jurisdiction in Oregon, because KBR had engaged in no acts expressly aimed at Oregon — its conduct toward Oregon Guard members in Iraq was not, without more, conduct aimed at Oregon. The $81 million judgment was vacated in its entirety. The twelve collected nothing on it, and as of this page’s date, October 17, 2026, nothing in the record shows any payment ever made on it.

The Oregon case did not end in Oregon. On September 25, 2015, as the Fifth Circuit later recounted, it was transferred to the Southern District of Texas and consolidated with McManaway — the suit first brought by the Indiana cohort, joined by American and British plaintiffs, some 166 in all by the final appeal. There the district court granted KBR summary judgment for inability to prove, by scientifically reliable evidence, that the exposure caused the injuries — including, separately, Gentry’s claims. On March 27, 2017, the Fifth Circuit affirmed in full (No. 15-20641): the claims were justiciable, rejecting KBR’s political-question argument, but causation had not been proved to a reasonable medical probability; the epidemiological evidence did not meet Texas law’s reliability threshold, and the plaintiffs’ own expert acknowledged he did not know any particular plaintiff’s dose. The court did not hold the plant was clean, the exposure unreal, or the soldiers not sick. It held the proof did not clear the legal bar for connecting the two. That is what remains: the exposure is conceded by the VA, found by an inspector general to have been prolonged by a contractor’s non-compliance, and named in an Army line-of-duty determination in a dead commander’s case — and the tort claims built on it are dismissed, finally, in the only courts that ever heard them.

For the British soldiers who guarded the same ground, the account is still open at home. Sky News investigations in 2024 and again in 2026 reported RAF veterans with cancers, a brain tumour, and daily nosebleeds and rashes, who said they were never offered the screening a November 25, 2003, RAF health-services letter had said should be offered. The Ministry of Defence’s position, as Sky News reported it, is that screening was offered and no-fault compensation is available under the War Pensions Scheme. The veterans seek an apology, answers, and an inquiry. As of this page’s date, they have not received the inquiry.

What the American veterans still seek is not, any longer, a verdict. It is what the 2009 bill would have given them: compensation for the illnesses they attribute to the plant, recognition not re-proven veteran by veteran, and monitoring that follows the exposure. The monitoring exists. The rest, on the record as it stands on October 17, 2026, does not.

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

The Qarmat Ali record was made in hearing rooms before it was made in courtrooms, and it is still being made on camera — by the Senate committee that heard the medic, the commander, and the named plaintiff in 2009, by the Indianapolis station that followed the Indiana battalion home, and by the British investigation that found the same orange dust in another country’s files. Four films, in the order the record grew.

The Senate hearing. The October 8, 2009, Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on the VA and DoD response to military exposures, Qarmat Ali among them — the institution answering, on the record, for how it handled the soldiers it had exposed. (Veteran Families for Education and Awareness.)

The Indiana battalion. WTHR's 2008 investigation, "The Hidden Enemy": two Indiana Guard soldiers exposed at Qarmat Ali with cancer, and the Guard working to contact more than 600 soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry, who may have been exposed. (WTHR.)

The British guard. Sky News's March 2024 investigation: nearly 100 British troops may have been exposed to sodium dichromate guarding the same plant, and the veterans calling for an apology and a public inquiry. (Sky News.)

Twenty years on. Sky News's follow-up report on the RAF veterans of Qarmat Ali — the cancer battles, the daily nosebleeds, the 2003 letter that said screening should be offered, and the screening the veterans say never came. (Sky News.)

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.