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the time in the shower.”
    Suddenly, at the age of forty-five, Fristoe died of a heart attack after living at Camp Lejeune for fifteen years. The doctors never could explain it, Dyer said, but she pointed out that the family had “lived in four different apartment complexes in Tarawa Terrace.”
    Unexplained illnesses affected other adults as well. In 1976, an eleven-year Marine and staff sergeant at Camp Lejeune, Lupe Alviar Jr., “started tripping, falling, [and] stumbling”—totally out of the blue. He was thirty years old and thought he was in perfect health.
    â€œMy legs just went,” he told The Veteran , a newsletter for Vietnam veterans, in 2004. “I felt fine at the time, had no health problems that I knew of, and I just fell down. I didn’t make much of it. I got up, brushed myself off, and carried on.”
    Then, about a month later, Alviar fell down again. “No warning,” he said. “I just suddenly found myself on the ground. So I got up another time, brushed off, and carried on.” Alviar thought he might have been affected by exposure in Vietnam to Agent Orange, the highly toxic herbicide containing dioxin that was used to clear jungle foliage. But his first child’s birth defects made him think there might be a connection to something that happened at his base in North Carolina.
    â€œMy first child was born at Camp Lejeune in 1969,” Alviar said. “He was born with an ear missing and his legs were twisted up like a pretzel.”
    It would not be until the early 1980s that Alviar’s insight into the possible origins of his own and his son’s health problems would find support.

5
    TROUBLE AT TARAWA TERRACE
    I think we kind of caught it right at the beginning.
    â€” CHUCK RUNDGREN, DIRECTOR, NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES, DIVISION OF HEALTH SERVICES, WATER SUPPLY BRANCH
    J eff Byron was on the threshold of his dreams when he moved to Camp Lejeune in early 1982. In the past year he had joined the Marines, survived boot camp, gotten married, and graduated from the Navy’s air-traffic control school in Millington, Tennessee. Best of all, his wife, Mary, was pregnant with their first child. 1
    Byron loved the Marine Corps—two of his uncles were Marines during World War II, and a cousin fought in Vietnam—but he wasn’t really thinking about joining when he graduated from Forest Park High School in Cincinnati in 1975. He went to Morehead State University in Kentucky, then left after a breakup with his girlfriend in his third year there. Back in Ohio, he made a living as a bartender (and met Mary when he was on the job in a bowling alley). Meanwhile, the state was going through economicdoldrums, just like the rest of the country. “It was the second-largest recession since the Great Depression in 1981 and it was hard to find a job,” he said. “I was overqualified for lower-paying jobs and under-qualified for higher-paying jobs.” So the Marines became a good path toward a better career, and Byron signed up in June 1981. He and Mary were married in Hamilton, Ohio, after Jeff finished boot camp in South Carolina and before he started at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Tennessee.
    When Byron was assigned to Camp Lejeune in early 1982, no housing was available on the base, so he and his wife rented a place in Jacksonville while waiting for a vacancy. Andrea was born in June. She was two months old when the family moved into base housing at Midway Park, directly across from the main gate at Camp Lejeune.
    Andrea seemed perfectly healthy before she lived on the base—her only visits to the doctor were for “well-baby” exams, Byron said. That quickly changed after the move into Midway Park, where the Byrons lived for a year. Things continued to go down-hill when the family lived in quarters at 3114 Bougainville Drive in the Tarawa Terrace housing complex from August 1983 until