street roots
4
Dec. 5, 2014
Toxic
soldiers
A Portland woman is among
thousands o f Army vets who say
they were poisoned by chemicals at
Ft. McClellan, and they want the
military to answer for it
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BY EMILY GREEN
staff w r ite r
t was the 1970s in Southern California,
and a teenage Laynie Roland could be
seen most days surfing and boogie
boarding along Newport Beach, about 40
miles west of her home in Ontario. With
her long, feathered, bleached-blonde
hair and wave-riding ways,
Roland embodied the typical
image of the Southern
California girl.
She was active
in high school
— a member of
a ir
several
including
academic clubs
committee and
th e
yearbook
newspaper, and she worked in the school’s
snack shop during the week when she
wasn’t ditching school to go to the beach
with her short board and a pack of friends.
In those days, before bumper-to-bumper
traffic became the norm in the arteries of
the greater Los Angeles area, it was only a
45-minute drive to “the usual breaks,” says
Roland, now a Portland resident
Shortly after graduating from high school,
Roland left her family behind and headed
south to attend Point Loma Nazarene
University in San Diego, where she would
often watch people surfing along a beach
that could be seen from her dorm room
window. Her future seemed ripe with
possibilities, and she felt a drive to do
something of great magnitude. A psychology
major at the time, she was only one year
into her studies when she decided the path
she was on wasn’t the one she was meant
for. “I knew there was something bigger
calling me,” she recalls.
As the daughter of a rough-around-the-
edges Navy gunner, she was naturally
curious about the possibility of a career in
the military. Almost immediately, the
service seemed to hold all the answers, she
recalls.
“I knew that was where I wanted to be.
That it was my calling,” she says. There was
just one minor detail standing in the way -
she would have to cut her long hair if she
was going to join the Navy or her second
choice, the Marines. To the 19-year-old self-
proclaimed “beach babe” with waist-length
locks, getting a short military haircut was
simply not an option.
This is how Roland came to join the U.S.
Army - it was the only branch of service
that would allow her to keep her long hair.
When she spoke with recruitment officers
on that fateful day in 1981, it was apparent:
The military wanted her. And she was
hooked.
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n January of 1982 she landed in Alabama,
and at F t McClellan, temperatures were
dipping below 20 degrees. The cold was a
shock to Roland’s system. Almost
immediately, she caught an upper
respiratory infection and spent her first few
days in the infirmary. She hadn’t fully
recovered when she began training. One
month in, she slipped off the side of Baines
Road while marching up a 45-degree incline
known as “Baby Baines.” Her leg twisted
halfway around at the knee, resulting in a
lasting knee injury. But she continued to
train on it for two more months despite the
pain, earning her the nickname “Roll-with-it
Roland.”
A portion of her framing that winter
included bivouac, which was “like camping,
only you wear war paint and carry a gun,”
says Roland. They set up tents and lived
outdoors, relying oh streams running
through the encampment for bathing,
cooking and filling up canteens with water
for drinking. She isn’t sure if it was because
she started off with a weakened immune
system due to the respiratory infection, or if
it was because she was training on a hurt
knee, but Roland’s health suffered
throughout training.
Just two.weeks before she was set to
graduate and step into her role as a military
police officer, Roland’s superiors summoned
I
her. “We noticed you’re having .trouble, and
it’s too late to recycle you,” she remembers
them saying. “We’re sending you home.”
Her discharge was “honorable with
erroneous enlistment,” because she says
they had misclassified her when she was
recruited. It was a small error, according to
Roland, and she technically still qualified for
military police training. “I’ve never been
able to fully understand why they pulled
me,” she says.
The discharge left Roland hurt and
confused. Back home again, living with her
parents, she attempted to pick up where "she
left off, and eventually returned to the
waves and the short board of h e r youth.
But this time she couldn’t push up to a
standing position, she couldn’t balance -
she couldn’t surf. Even walking on the sand
was painful.
After her failed attempt at surfing, she
went to the Department of Veterans Affairs
hospital to have her knee examined. She
says doctors there told her that her days of
physical activity were over and that she
would never be able to surf again. She soon
filed a disability claim with the VA, but it
was denied — which is common for someone
with an erroneous enlistment discharge.
In the weeks that followed, Roland’s
health faded. She lost 30 pounds during her
See TOXIC, page 5