They Knew: Burn Pits
They Knew: Burn Pits
Of all the cases in this series, this is the one where the warning was written from inside the wire, while the pit was still burning — by the Air Force's own bioenvironmental flight commander at Joint Base Balad, in a signed memo, in December 2006. The monitoring had begun two years earlier. The official posture, for years afterward, was that the risk was "acceptable." The concession took until 2022. Read the dates.
The timeline
2004 — The monitoring begins. The Department of Defense begins conducting environmental monitoring and health studies at Joint Base Balad, Iraq — one of the largest U.S. bases in the theater, where an open burn pit disposes of the base’s waste, at its peak perhaps 100–200 tons a day. The knowledge-gathering starts while the burning does. Nothing that follows can be explained by an absence of data collection: the government was measuring from 2004.
December 20, 2006 — The Curtis memo. Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, the Air Force bioenvironmental flight commander at Joint Base Balad, puts his assessment in writing, co-signed by Lt. Col. James Elliott, chief of aeromedical services, 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing:
“In my professional opinion, there is an acute health hazard for individuals. There is also the possibility for chronic health hazards associated with the smoke.”
“It is amazing that the burn pit has been able to operate without restrictions over the past few years.”
The memo — which surfaced publicly in *Military Times’* 2008 investigation — lists what the troops at Balad were breathing: benzene, arsenic, dichlorofluoromethane (Freon), carbon monoxide, ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfuric acid, and xylene. This is not a veteran’s recollection reconstructed decades later. It is a serving officer’s professional opinion, written at the base, in 2006.
2007 & 2009 — The official answer: “acceptable.” The U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine and the Air Force Institute for Operational Health run ambient-air sampling and screening health-risk assessments at Balad. Their reports find the risk of acute health effects low and long-term health risks “acceptable.” DoD risk-assessment studies released in May 2008 and June 2009 state the same posture in other words: burn pits posed an “acceptable” or “safe” health risk to personnel stationed at Balad. In May 2008, DoD health officials said burn pits did not cause health problems; in April 2009, the Department clarified that emissions may cause problems for servicemembers with elevated individual susceptibilities. Between the flight commander’s memo and the official assessments, the troops kept breathing the pit.
October 1, 2009 — Balad’s pit closes. The Joint Base Balad burn pit ceases operation, replaced by incinerators. The pit that official assessments had pronounced acceptable is shut down — at Balad. Burning continues across both theaters.
October 15, 2010 — GAO reports to Congress. The Government Accountability Office’s report GAO-11-63, Afghanistan and Iraq: DOD Should Improve Adherence to Its Guidance on Open Pit Burning and Solid Waste Management, records the record against the posture. Per DoD itself, “burn pit emissions can contain toxic substances that harm human health.” CENTCOM did not issue comprehensive burn pit guidance until 2009 — years into both wars. Operators at the four Iraq bases GAO visited were not complying with key elements of that guidance, including the restrictions on burning items such as plastic. And U.S. forces were not sampling or monitoring burn pit emissions as CENTCOM’s own regulation required. As of August 2010, CENTCOM counted 221 burn pits in Afghanistan and 22 in Iraq.
October 2011 — “Inadequate or insufficient.” The Institute of Medicine’s report, Long-Term Health Consequences of Exposure to Burn Pits in Iraq and Afghanistan (2011), delivers the conclusion the claims system would rely on for the next decade. Its central finding, in the committee’s exact words:
“On the basis of a review of the epidemiologic literature, the committee concluded that there is inadequate/insufficient evidence of an association between exposure to combustion products and cancer, respiratory disease, circulatory disease, neurologic disease, and adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in the populations studied. However, there is limited/suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to combustion products and reduced pulmonary function in the populations studied.”
The committee further concluded it was “unable to say whether long-term health effects are likely to result from exposure to emissions from the burn pit at JBB” — and recorded that the Department of Defense had been unable to provide it with any information specific to the waste stream actually burned at Balad. Read that pairing carefully: the evidence was “inadequate,” on a record the Department itself had left inadequate — no waste-stream data for the committee, no emissions monitoring as its own regulation required. Whatever the committee intended, the claims system heard a verdict it could use, and the denials ran for another decade.
August 10, 2022 — The concession. The PACT Act (Pub. L. 117-168) enacts the burn-pit presumptive list for the Iraq and Afghanistan generation — the statutory concession that the exposure the Curtis memo flagged in 2006, and the GAO documented in 2010, is presumed connected to a schedule of diseases. Sixteen years from the memo. Eighteen from the first monitoring. Conceded, as always in this series, by an Act of Congress — not volunteered by the system that ran the pits.
What this timeline is — and what it is not
The discipline of this series, stated plainly: this timeline destroys the “nobody knew” excuse. It does not, by itself, prove any one man’s claim. What burn-pit smoke did to a particular veteran’s lungs is a medical question, answered case by case — and the PACT Act’s presumptions now decide many of those cases the way Congress directed. What this timeline settles is the excuse: the hazard was assessed, in writing, by the Air Force’s own flight commander in 2006; the emissions were described by DoD itself, in GAO’s report, as containing “toxic substances that harm human health.” Nobody at Balad lacked for knowledge. What they lacked was a system willing to act on it before Congress made it.
Did you live downwind of a burn pit — at Balad, or any of the other 241 pits GAO counted? Tell Your Story. The full arc is at They Knew — The Pattern.