When Dave Crete was stationed at the Nevada Test and Training Range as an Air Force security troop in the late 1980s, his dorm room was just over two miles from a nuclear test site. Just getting onto the range, known as the NTTR, through its main gate puts you within miles of one of the base’s five sites.

Crete now has 20 tumors throughout his body and deals with brain cysts and atrophy, meaning his brain is shrinking.

“That’s not too bad. I’m one of the healthy ones. Average age of death for our unit is 65,” Crete said to a congressional panel Tuesday. “I don’t know anybody yet that’s made it to 80.”

On Tuesday, Crete joined other veteran advocates at a roundtable on Capitol Hill to discuss toxic exposures from their service that are not covered under the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, known as the PACT Act .

Passed in 2022, the PACT Act deemed certain illnesses and cancers as service-related for those exposed to burn pits during Iraq and Afghanistan deployments and for Vietnam War veterans with Agent Orange-related chemicals. However, while the PACT Act covers some instances of toxic exposure at domestic military bases, there are gaps, and some veterans are warning Congress that they’re slipping through the cracks.

Rosie Torres, a co-founder of Burn Pits 360, a veterans group focused on toxic exposure, said the roundtable highlighted past exposure incidents that weren’t included in the PACT Act and implications for future generations that should be considered amid political conversations around the future of veteran benefits.

“It’s a way to show that there’s a need for healthcare in the [Department of Veterans Affairs] and for Congress to acknowledge these other incidents and if there are opportunities to amend the PACT Act, that that be done,” she said.

Danny Sebeck, a Space Force officer and co-director of the Torchlight Initiative, which advocates for the Air Force missile community, said the PACT Act “does a great job” of covering care for people that are overseas. But what Sebeck and other advocates told members of Congress Tuesday is that there are coverage gaps for service members and their families who live at bases and are exposed to toxic chemicals.

“There’s a common theme here obviously, that’s why we’re all here and we’re taking a lot of casualties. These casualties are not taken in battle instead they’re taken in our workplace,” Sebeck said. “We need to absolutely add some of these kind of smaller, unknown communities to the PACT Act.”

Speakers included veterans, family members and advocates with stories of toxic exposure from the Red Hill fuel spill at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii as well as a long-closed California base, which was deemed to be among the most poluted sites in America by the EPA. Veterans and spouses shared their stories of cancer fights, miscarriages and other illnesses from exposure to toxins, radiation, fuel spills, and chemical contaminations during their service going back to the 1980s. Advocacy groups asked for support to help aviators who suffer higher cancer rates from their service and families who were exposed to local toxins at bases abroad like at Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Atsugi, Japan .

Secret base, toxic sites

Crete said his brain cysts are not part of his rating as a service-connected disability. He is also not covered under PACT Act since he served in the 80s after the law’s Agent Orange coverage was active (between Jan. 9, 1962, and May 7, 1975) and because the Nevada range is not registered as a toxic site.

“They knew when they did the assessment that our air was contaminated, our soil was contaminated, and our drinking water was contaminated so the water that my food was cooked in was contaminated, the water that I showered in every day was contaminated,” he said. “I am asking that Congress please allow us to get the benefits that every other veteran has earned.”

About a decade before Crete worked at the NTTR, a federal environmental assessment of the Tonopah Test Range , which is part of the complex, stated the environmental impacts of the range included scarring of the land and roads by shrapnel impact, the scattering of debris, toxic and radioactive materials and explosive wastes “burned in the open.” It also considered the “exposure of the working staff” as an “unavoidable adverse environmental impact.”

“As long as the nation chooses to maintain an up-to-date nuclear weapon stockpile, some facility such as the Tonopah Test Range must continue to exist,” the 1975 report from the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration said. “Because it is well isolated from man and his works, from an environmental point of view, the operation of the Range should be permitted to continue. The environmental costs inherent in the work are small and reasonable for the benefits received.”

Military service members and their families are “disproportionately exposed” to chemicals like asbestos to toxic chemicals in the soil and groundwater, said Jared Hayes, policy analyst for the Environmental Working Group.

“The [Department of Defense] has consistently downplayed the risks of failing to alert the service members of the presence of toxic chemicals by failing to track the presence of toxic chemicals in their bodies,” Hayes said.

A February Government Accountability Report found that estimates to clean up “forever chemicals,” or more technically known as polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS, from military bases will cost $9.3 billion in fiscal year 2025 and beyond. However, the GAO found that the costs will continue to increase as the department learns about the “breadth and depth” of the needs.

“Often we think veterans’ injuries deriving from action in far away lands while under fire. We know that this is simply not true,” ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said at the roundtable.

‘We shouldn’t have to be our own lawyers, doctors, researchers’

The veteran groups said there’s not enough transparency about their exposures to toxins in the form of PFAS , ground and water contaminations, and other chemicals from their military jobs.

Candace Wheeler, director for government and legislative Affairs for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, called for troops to be able to access exposure records kept by the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs known as an Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record , or ILER. Those records track troops’ toxin or environmental exposure. She also said there should be an ILER 2.0 for military family members.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could take either, and then the electronic medical records, and use these together to be proactive and reach out to our veterans and their families and get an early notification,” Wheeler said. “There is a huge difference between stage one and stage four cancer. We can save lives if we are proactive.”

Wheeler, whose husband served as an Air Force fighter pilot at the now-shuttered George Air Force Base, California , said the installation was designated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s as a highly contaminated site, but they were never officially notified. At the time, families were experiencing higher rates of infertility and miscarriages, adding that “people were told: don’t get pregnant at George.”

Christy Foran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation, said military members face the same occupational hazards from exposure to toxic chemicals as firefighters exposed to PFAS, utility and transportation workers who handle fuels or industrial workers dealing with solvents and heavy metals. These exposures can lead to cancers and respiratory and cardiac issues, Foran said, adding that maintaining “careful records” is critical to understanding the safety impacts.

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A hurdle to that record-keeping is that the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have different types of data on exposures.

“Keeping track of these exposures to identify the potential health consequences is challenging in part because there are two systems that have to work together,” she said. Later on during the roundtable, Foran said that more research would be required to put the pieces together to spot links between exposure and health ailments.

Veterans testified that the lack of transparency has led them to do the behind-the-scenes research necessary to prove that their cancers or other health conditions are the result of exposure at their military installations.

“It’s heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching,” Torres of Burn Pits 360 said. “We shouldn’t have to be our own lawyers, doctors, researchers, and that’s what I’ve been witnessing today.”

Mandy Feindt, an Army major whose family was exposed to the fuel spill at Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility along with 90,000 others at the Hawaii base, said the Navy failed to inform service members of the risks they, and their families faced.

“When Red Hill happened, the Navy knew for six months,” Feindt said at the roundtable in Washington, D.C. “Thousands of families cooked their Thanksgiving meals with jet-fuel-contaminated water, including mine.”

Back in 2022, when Task & Purpose asked the service about the accusations that the Navy withheld information from families on base, a spokesperson said that “information provided to our residents, our communities, the public and the media was accurate at the time.”

Five Navy admirals and seven captains faced rebuke for the Red Hill fuel leak in 2023.

While the PACT Act legislation directed the VA to study the human impact of jet fuel exposure and report it back to Congress, Red Hill was not included, she said.

While a lot of progress has been made, Feindt said, “there’s not been a lot of lessons learned,” and called for more mandatory medical testing at the first instance of known toxic exposure.

“When several thousand people ended up in the hospital, and I, as a mother, begged for testing hair, skin, nails, take a body part if you have to. I want to know what it is that my children have consumed,” Feindt said. “The Navy somehow felt they reserved the right to know more about what my children were being exposed to than I did as their own mother.”

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