All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone with veteransradio.net.
We are recording today from the Legal Help for Veterans Studio in Northville, Michigan.
The Legal Help for Veterans is a Veterans Disability Law Firm and you can reach us at 800-693-4800.
Our guest today may be the farthest away that we've ever had on Veterans Radio.
We're going to talk today with Greg Lovett, who's the Producer Director of a Film Regarding Burn Pits.
Greg, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you for having me.
Well, we're thrilled to have you.
You are over in Europe, in Holland at the moment.
So we're glad that we could make this connection and bring you to our Veterans Radio listening audience here in the United States.
No problem. Thanks for having me.
Well, Greg, tell us a little bit about the documentary that you are in the process of finalizing called Delay Denied, Hope You Die, How America Poisoned its Soldiers.
So about maybe about a year and a half ago or possibly two years ago now, I read a book by a man named Joseph Hickman called The Burn Pits.
I read a lot of nonfiction and it was one of those books that, to be honest, just sort of pisses you off.
It's sad, but it also makes you really mad when you find out what is happening to soldiers who served overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I had never heard about Burn Pits until I read this book in which he described how the army was confronted with the problem of garbage, what to do with garbage, and how to get rid of garbage.
And their solution on all these military bases on about 200 bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan was to burn the garbage.
And through all the junk that's accumulated in war into these big open air pits.
And when I say everything, I mean literally everything from plastics, rubber, to dead animals, amputated body parts, medicine, even vehicles.
And then they would set it on fire and burn it.
And depending on the base that you were at, they may have been quote unquote little Burn Pits, but some of them, like in Balad in northern Iraq, was the size of several football fields and burned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So fast forward 10 years later, these soldiers are home and they're getting sick.
And they're contracting illnesses that they really shouldn't be getting.
A lot of these men and women who served overseas were of course healthy.
And now they're contracting all kinds of illnesses from respiratory problems to rare forms of cancers.
And when you do the research and really look at the facts, you can link this back to their exposures from the Burn Pits.
And Greg, as you read this book and it's interesting and it pisses you off kind of way, how does that move you then to saying, I need to get this story out.
I need to tell this in a different manner and sort of lead you to the documentary film approach.
Well, I've been working in television my whole life.
I've lived in Holland now for about 30 years, but before that in the US when I was younger, my father worked in television.
So I kind of grew up in the business.
So I was producing directing shows there and for about the first 10 years in Holland, I also had my own production company and produced shows.
But for about the last 10 or 15 years, I had kind of moved more into management, so I had been involved with different kinds of multimedia projects and internet and digital television and that kind of thing.
And it was about the time I read the book that I was sort of thinking I'd love to return back to my roots.
I'd like to get back into production again.
I wasn't really interested in game shows or quiz shows or talent shows or the kind of thing that's popular on TV.
I'm kind of at an age now where I think I'd like to do something that makes a difference.
So I was sort of looking for a project to begin with, trying to think of an interesting idea.
And when I read the book, to be honest, I thought, well, somebody's going to make a documentary about this, so that's going to be cool.
But then after about six months went by or so, last summer, really, I thought, you know, I talked to a couple people that I contacted from the book and I started going on the internet and I looked a little bit and finding people.
And nobody was telling me that they had been contacted by any other producer.
So then I just thought, well, there's no time like the present.
This could be my project.
And from a personal point of view, it has all the things I was looking for.
It has emotion and it has drama and it has, you know, controversy.
And those are the kind of things that you also look for to create a documentary.
It has to be interesting and moving.
It has to keep people watching.
And I thought it had an important message to tell.
And I hope that if I could get it finished, that it might help to create awareness and really maybe make a difference.
Well, I think that's one of the things that on Veterans Radio, we try to tell these stories because so many people are not aware of what's going on.
And, you know, they may not sit down and read a book that Joe Hickman wrote called The Burn Pits, but they will take an hour of time and watch your documentary.
Tell us what's inside the documentary.
Who are the people you interviewed?
Is it just soldiers?
Is there science involved?
Tell us a little bit about the documentary.
Well, the story of how the documentary got made is actually interesting in itself because obviously I'm over here in Holland and the post-production could be done over here,
but all the production work had to be done in the U.S.
And I didn't have $100,000 to produce a documentary.
So what I first did was I researched who I want to talk to.
So I've talked to six soldiers, some who are terminally ill.
I think about four soldiers actually appear in the documentary.
I was scheduled to talk to more, but unfortunately one died, one is now bedridden.
So some of them were actually too sick to even appear.
And so what I did when I found out who I wanted to talk to was I literally went on the Internet and contacted some production companies locally.
So for example, I interviewed a man by the name of Jesse Baca in New Mexico.
So I found a production company in New Mexico that was willing to work with me and they conducted the interview for me in New Mexico and then one in Oklahoma and one in Oregon.
And these people are all professional production people who are working, I don't want to say on a volunteered basis, but let's say for deferred payment.
They provided their services at no cost because once they heard about the story, they decided they wanted to get involved.
And that's the case for about the 15 or 20 people that I interviewed.
I did interview several doctors, one in New York and one at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Both of these doctors have been conducting research for the past 10 years and they're both convinced that the illnesses that they're coming across can only be caused by toxic exposure.
I've talked to a lawyer because a number of the soldiers are involved in a lawsuit against KBR.
I mean, that's a whole other story in itself.
KBR was a daughter company of Halliburton and they had the waste management responsibilities on a number of these bases.
They were a private contractor that the United States government paid, I'm sure, boatloads of money to manage this waste stream and waste disposal.
Go ahead and continue.
And they didn't do it correctly.
They were supposed to follow certain regulations including EPA regulations in the States.
They were supposed to treat these bases like little pieces of America, which by definition means you can't burn anything in open air.
Obviously, they didn't do it.
They were sued.
So the lawyer appears in the documentary.
I speak to a man by the name of Rick Lamberth who actually worked for KBR.
So he has firsthand knowledge of the mismanagement and of the cover-up that KBR committed.
It's a wide range of people that have different points of view that I hope come together to tell the story very clearly and concisely.
I think we get the message across pretty well that it's not only an issue of sick soldiers, but it's also the politics of how KBR got the contract and how they mismanaged it.
It also goes into a little bit about the treatment that they are getting, or I should say not getting, by the VA because the government and the VA still deny that these soldiers are sick because of their exposure to burn pits.
That means that they can't always get the treatment that they need and so they become sicker.
Or in cases of some people, they have to pay for the treatment themselves. One soldier I talked to appears in the documentary as $250,000 worth of debt because of health costs that is not covered.
So it's a big story with a lot of issues in it.
That's what I wanted to get across to our veteran radio listeners. We're talking to Greg Lovett, who's the producer, director of an upcoming documentary called Delay Denied, Hope You Die, How America Poisoned Soldiers,
focused on the use of burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq. What's really different, I think, too, is that the waste streams that were being burned today as compared to 30 or 40 years ago, because this method has been used time and memorial,
it's a pretty crude way to get rid of stuff is to burn it, but now it's full of batteries and appliances and plastics and computer chips and all kinds of toxic parts that get pieces that get thrown into these burn pits.
Is that what you found from your talking to the soldiers?
That's exactly right. They said that literally everything had to be disposed of in these burn pits because there was no other place to get rid of the garbage.
Now there's a debate about why didn't they bury it? Why didn't they ship it out? Why did they use incinerators? That's a whole other issue because according to Senator Udall of New Mexico,
incinerators were budgeted for and KBR received money for incinerators which would have burned everything at much higher temperature and would have deposited less toxins into the air, but they didn't use incinerators.
So that's another issue. Nobody knows exactly why. And when you look at things like plastic water bottles, for example, I believe the average soldier in Iraq in the middle of summer uses 10 water bottles per day.
Well, if you've got 20,000 people on a base, that's 200,000 water bottles, plastic water bottles that you're just burning every single day.
So never mind just the plastic, but like you said, it's old computers, it's trucks. The trucks that were abandoned or damaged or couldn't be repaired were just thrown in.
And one of the doctors talks about how he found pieces of metal in the lungs of soldiers. Well, how else did it get there if it wasn't for the burn pits?
And one of the things that I think anybody who's been around a burn pit knows is you have a lot of what I'll call incomplete combustion.
It doesn't really burn everything up like an incinerator is supposed to do. It catches it on fire to a certain point, and then the particulate matter floats away in the wind.
It's incomplete combustion. Did any of your scientists talk about those kinds of problems of what we were putting into the atmosphere?
Yes, I mean one of the soldiers, Dr. Sari kind of made a joke, but he said, you know, we're supposed to breathe clean air and anything in the air can cause disease.
So just anybody who's allergic to pollen or something, of course, knows that. So anytime you're burning anything, it's going to damage you.
And we have video of these huge plumes of black smoke that are just sitting over the base where the soldiers worked and ate and slept.
And some of the soldiers describe it as thick as fog. And they all say that you actually had to wipe the dust off you.
It would actually just fall into that's how much it was. I think it was one soldier even mentioned how one of their jobs was just cleaning the airplanes from the dust of the burn pits because it would prevent airplanes from flying.
So it was actually something you could see, you could smell. It would burn their nose, it would burn their throat, it would settle on their clothes and obviously also in their lungs.
One of the things that is sometimes more convincing than words are the photos, the images. Were you able to find both videos and maybe satellite photographs or regular photographs of these burn pits to communicate the size and extensive them?
We were. It was tricky because at the time that the soldiers were serving, they didn't really think about it in the most cases.
They didn't really think about that it was dangerous. Some of them just believed what they were told, which is it's not harmful.
So they just thought, okay, so the majority of soldiers serving didn't think about making pictures or making videos.
Having said that, I was able to find some soldiers who made, I guess they weren't iPhone videos back then because we didn't have iPhones, but very low resolution, bad quality video.
But you can definitely see what it was like and what a burn pit really consisted of. There are some good images in the documentary, I think of everything from smoldering pits, like you said before, where everything is not really burned.
It's just sort of sitting there smoldering. And then we also have images of these huge plumes of smoke that just go, I mean, I don't know how many feet, but a lot of feet, 50 feet or so is what one soldier told me, into the air and floating over the barracks.
So we were able to get some images to convey what it must have been like for the soldiers living there.
And Greg Lovett, producer and director of this documentary, were you able to find anybody either in the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the Veterans Administration?
Would any of those officials go on camera and take a position that you were able to incorporate into the documentary on burn pits?
Well, they wouldn't talk to me. I did reach out to people in the Department of Defense and to KBR, for example, but they didn't want to speak.
But I was able to find some archive material. For example, there's a man who used to work with the Department of Defense who talks about how they conducted, they being the military, conducted their own study into the burn pits
and found out that there was nothing wrong. It was not harmful to live and work near the burn pits. Now, of course, I have other people in the documentary who refute that and talk about how that study was flawed.
And I do have some archive material from KBR's lawyer who claims that they were just doing what they were told to do and it's not their problem.
And of course, then I have the man who used to work with KBR who said, well, we weren't doing what we were told to do. We knew what we were doing was wrong and we did it anyway.
Well, I think this is an informative topic and aggravating documentary. And I mean that in high praise. I hope you take it that way, Greg.
Tell us how the documentary is coming along and when it will be out and how people might view it and follow it.
We actually just finished the documentary yesterday, which would have been the 22nd of May. We're just putting the last little frames or bars of music on.
So it's basically done. Your second question is a little bit more difficult to answer because the life of a documentary filmmaker involves a lot of sales.
So I have to go out now and sort of pitch it to the Netflixes and the HBOs and the showtimes of the world and see if they're interested in broadcasting.
I've worked in the business for a while, so I have about a database of about 300 or so TV channels around the world that of course I will approach.
I'm focused mostly on the U.S. because that's where this takes place and this is where the soldiers live who are most effective.
So that's the market I want to focus on, obviously. I will submit it to some film festivals.
If you're lucky, you get picked up by some film festivals. A lot of these buyers of documentaries go to these film festivals, so they might see it and they might want to then purchase it.
So that's a whole struggle in itself after you get the documentary made. That's really just part one. The second part is really going out and see if you can interest people.
But I have about 1,200 people on our documentary Facebook page, so I can try to get them involved and they can write to Netflix and ask to see the documentary.
We can try a grassroots campaign and basically just have to go out there and hit the road, start knocking on doors and trying to drum up interest and find somebody who wants to buy it.
Let's direct some people to your Facebook page or other website or media accounts. Give us some ideas on how we can track you and track this documentary.
You can go to facebook.com and then slash burn pits documentary. It's all one word. So www.facebook.com slash burn pits documentary. That will take you to our page.
I have some short clips of the interviews that I posted from time to time while we were busy. You can also see the trailer for the documentary which you can then share. It's actually been seen by about 250,000 people so far, which is pretty good.
You can stay up to date with our progress and what we're doing and you can see how you might be able to get involved if you want to bring this to your local station or to Netflix or to HBO and help us get distribution.
I want to encourage all veteran radio listeners to go to Facebook, go to, I just did it myself, put in the burn pits documentary into the search bar. It'll come right up. You'll see delay, deny, hope you die, pop up and like it and follow it.
This is the sort of documentary I think that not only veterans should see but policymakers, family and friends to understand what their loved ones went through when they were overseas in the sand pit.
Is it your hope that this gets out into distribution in the next six months, next year? What's the normal distribution cycle, Greg, for a documentary?
It can take a while. It can sometimes take upwards of a year but I hope in this case that it doesn't take that long. I hope that people realize that this is a unique story but it's also something that's happening now.
It's current. You see soldiers in the documentary who are sick and dying now and they need help, their family needs help and the more people to find out about it, the better.
I actually just did an interview with a reporter from Fox News in LA a couple weeks ago. She had seen the trailer and she was interested.
This is somebody who works in the television and media business and she knew nothing about this.
The majority of people don't know anything about it and actually one of the doctors told me that he thinks the majority of soldiers don't even know about this. He thinks that there's a lot of soldiers out there who may be tired and winded and coughing or having rashes or other kinds of illnesses or irritations
and not immediately link it to the burn pits. Right now there are estimates of about 100,000 sick soldiers. He thinks that could be many more.
Unfortunately, most veterans go to private doctors. Certainly, private doctors wouldn't make that link and even VA doctors won't make that link. I think that's why awareness is important.
Whether you're a spouse of a soldier or a soldier say, hey, since you can't really figure this out, could it be this? He lived here for 12 months and breathed this stuff in. Is that a possibility?
I suspect that that's what your documentary film here on burn pits would do, is sort of make people aware enough to ask a question.
I hope so because a lot of the problems for some of the lung issues that the soldiers are suffering from is in the diagnosis.
Dr. Miller at Vanderbilt University, who was really one of the first ones to link some of these illnesses with the burn pits, discovered certain things only because he did lung biopsies.
Now, I'm not a doctor, obviously, but a lung biopsy is apparently a pretty invasive operation. For example, some of the soldiers were coming in and complaining that they just were out of breath.
I used to be able to run my two miles in 10 minutes or whatever regulation time is. I can't do that anymore. I feel okay, but I'm just winded.
They would do normal examination CT scans and pulmonary function testing and that kind of thing. Those all turned out to be perfectly normal.
It was only when he actually went deep into the lungs that he would find tears in the lungs that they would find metal deposited in the lungs.
The problem is the VA doesn't cover a lot of these invasive kind of surgeries because they just look at the basic facts and say, well, look, you did these tests and there's nothing wrong with them.
He had to convince a lot of people, no, we need to actually physically go deeper into the body to figure out what's going wrong.
He did that with a couple dozen soldiers and he discovered that they're really suffering. A lot of these people from a disease called constrictive bronchiolitis, which is a terminal lung disease in which the lining of your lung is actually destroyed.
But then what happened was when he reported his findings to the Department of Defense, who was actually referring some of these sick patients to him, the Department of Defense decided not to send any soldiers his way anymore
and just sort of deny the research that he's been doing and the information that he'd collected.
Well, that's a sad state of affairs, but unfortunately not one that's terribly surprising to somebody who works in this area.
I want to thank you, Greg Lovett, for taking some time out today to talk to us about your very important and informative documentary.
I encourage our veteran radio listeners to go to Facebook, go look for the Burn Pits documentary so that you can follow it.
Hopefully, just burn Pits documentary with no luck.
Ah, okay, excellent. Get the word out about this to people.
I want to thank you for listening to Veterans Radio today. I am Jim Fossone. It's a pleasure to be your host.
We are a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at 800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to our podcasts and internet radio shows at veteransradio.net.
Until next time, you are dismissed.
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