For three decades -- from the 1950s to the mid-1980s -- the water supply used by hundreds of thousands of Marines and their families was laced with chemicals from an off-base dry-cleaning company and industrial solvents used to clean military equipment.
"The Marine Corps knowingly poisoned their own people," Partain recently said in his living room, surrounded by stacks of military documents and water analysis reports. "They were told about the water, and they did nothing. Nothing. And then they lied about it."
