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June 1985. In that period of less than three years, Andrea was at the base hospital a total of fifty-seven times—an average of nearly twice a month—for treatment of a variety of ailments. There were rashes, ear infections, coughs, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, and unexplained fevers. “Most of the time the medical personnel on base did not have an explanation for her symptoms,” Byron said. “We were told to give her tepid baths and children’s Tylenol to reduce the fevers.”
    One of the worst episodes involved three visits to the emergency room on the weekend after Thanksgiving in 1983, when Andrea’s fever soared as high as 105.8 degrees. Again, doctors hadno idea what was causing the baby’s temperature to rise so far above normal.
    Around the same time, another family was struggling with the serious but unexplained illness of their own daughter. Janey Ensminger was the six-year-old child of Jerry and Etsuko Ensminger, a drill instructor and his Japanese wife who lived on and off of Camp Lejeune for eleven of the nearly twenty-five years that Jerry was in the Corps. He was a career Marine, having joined right out of high school in 1970 in hopes of avenging his older brother’s severe wounding at the hands of the Vietcong. 2
    Born on the Fourth of July in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1952, Jerry Ensminger was the third of six children in a family that was anything but steeped in the military. His father was an orphan who became a pipefitter and part-time farmer in south central Pennsylvania; he had fought the Germans in Greenland during World War II. His brother Dave had signed up for service only because he wanted to get married and pursue a career as a veterinarian, but couldn’t afford college. The Marine Corps offered to send him to officers’ school after boot camp, but Dave wanted to do only a two-year stint to qualify for the GI Bill, so he was assigned to the infantry with orders for Vietnam.
    There, in an orchard in the Mekong Delta, Sergeant Dave Ensminger was leading a team that was training Vietnamese fighters when he crouched down to look into some brush as his unit was putting down its gear nearby. An explosion ripped into his lower body. A Marine from New Jersey ran to help and was killed by a second powerful blast. Dave Ensminger survived, but he had shrapnel in his skull and was paralyzed on the right side of his body. He came home facing years of therapy to learn how to walk again; eventually he would be able to handle a job as a mechanic at a Navy shipyard. These events on the other side of the worldchanged the direction of Jerry Ensminger’s life. Ensminger hadn’t even waited for his high-school graduation ceremony to be over before he joined the Marines. Some of his classmates, caught up in the antiwar fury felt by many young Americans in the spring of 1970, derided his decision to sign up. One of them spit on Ensminger. “I knocked his ass out,” Ensminger said.
    â€œI wanted to go to Vietnam—it was a revenge motive,” he said. “But in 1970 we were starting to pull out.” Ensminger ended up as a mechanic assigned to Camp Johnson, one of the ancillary bases at Camp Lejeune, where he worked on equipment that was used in training Marines to drive military vehicles. Then he was sent to Okinawa, Japan, as part of the support teams for bombing runs to Vietnam and Cambodia. It was there that he met Etsuko Asako, who was working in the Navy mess hall, and the two dated for a year and a half while Ensminger was assigned to the base. After filing scores of documents required by both the Marine Corps and the Japanese government, including a translated transcript of Asako’s family history, the couple was married and had a daughter in Okinawa.
    When he got orders to return to Camp Lejeune in 1973, Ensminger was a sergeant in the 8th Engineer Battalion, “but even with a sergeant’s pay it was shit