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housing,” he said. His family initially rented a trailer on the base, but as soon as better quarters became available in Tarawa Terrace, Ensminger broke his lease and moved his wife and baby there. It was in Tarawa Terrace in 1975 that Etsuko became pregnant with the girl they would name Janey.
    Jerry Ensminger volunteered for the drill field around that time and went to the boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, for training. Since he could end up anywhere after his graduation as a drill instructor, his wife would remain at Camp Lejeune until she found out where the family would move next. As it turned out, shewas on the base for almost two months of Janey’s first trimester of development.
    On December 19, 1975, Ensminger graduated and was assigned to stay at Parris Island. He immediately headed north to Camp Lejeune to pick up his pregnant wife and daughter. When he arrived, Etsuko was working hard to clean out their quarters so it would pass the series of inspections the Marine Corps required before anyone could move out. But Jerry Ensminger was anxious to have his family back together again. “I said to hell with it and hired a company to clean it that guaranteed you’d pass inspection,” he said. “There was a payoff of course; they operated with kick-backs. I just wanted to get out of there.”
    At Parris Island, twenty-three-year-old Master Sergeant Ensminger was in the best condition—both physically and mentally—of his life. “I had muscles in my shit,” he laughed. And he knew how to work recruits, berating them during the rigorous drills with favorite phrases, such as “Did your mother have any children who lived?” and “You are a paraplegic piece of pig shit!”
    Janey Ensminger was born on July 30, 1976, at the Buford Naval Hospital near Parris Island. The baby girl seemed perfectly normal, though she never crawled—she rolled, her father said. “She learned to get up on her knees and rolled to the left.” By the time the family moved back to Camp Lejeune in 1982, she was a precocious, fun-loving, and very active child. The Ensmingers moved into a house off the base at the time, but Jerry and Etsuko frequently took Janey and her two sisters (another daughter, Veronica, had also been born at Parris Island) to use the swimming pools at Camp Lejeune.
    The problems began in the late spring and early summer of 1983, around the same time the Ensmingers were planning a trip to Pennsylvania for the wedding of Jerry’s sister. Janey, a few monthsshy of seven years old, came down with a case of strep throat that she couldn’t seem to shake. “We were going to cancel the trip to Pennsylvania, and then she got better, so we went,” Ensminger said. “But then in Carlyle I had to take her to the base hospital. She got worse.”
    The family returned to North Carolina and Janey was still not feeling well. “I stayed home with her when we got back,” Ensminger said. “It was on a Sunday in July and she got really hot. I was putting cold compresses on her and when I took off her shirt I noticed little hickeys on her back.” Ensminger didn’t know what they were—he learned later they were petechiae caused by hemorrhaging beneath the skin—but he knew they were a bad sign, and he rushed Janey to the base hospital.
    â€œIt was crowded, on a Sunday, but luckily my battalion surgeon was on duty and he ordered blood work,” Ensminger said. “I could tell something was wrong, the way they were looking at her.”
    After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, and with his patience wearing thin—“I was ready to leap over the desk to demand an explanation,” he said—the doctor finally called Ensminger back behind the counter while Janey was brought back into the waiting room with a Navy corpsman. The doctor said he had been waiting for the head of pediatrics to come but felt he