Dereliction of Duty

“We have to step back and say, ‘How have we failed?’” Turner told Humbert. “Our veterans deserve a respectful, peaceful final resting place.”

Actually, veterans’ tombstones deserve respect too. That would logically lead to including those veterans’ headstones that are making their way to the surface as the West LA VA biomedical nuclear and chemical dump’s hillside dirt erodes around them. It would seem likely that there would be more than ten atomic tombstones. EnviroReporter.com has obtained a photograph, circa 1971, that shows a huge load of rubble, and what appear to be tombstones, being dumped exactly where the debris is located today dotted with the grave markers.

To get all the tombstones out of this debris-strewn hillside of the dump would require considerable effort. That effort would be complicated by the fact that the veterans’ grave markers are buried in a toxic waste site which could possibly require excavators to wear hazardous materials protective outfits and masks.

Judging from the current soil sampling being done in the dump, where the VA’s contractors seem not to be coring where the known dump is, an excavation of the tombstones seems a remote possibility. Repeated telephone and e-mail requests for VA comment from the LA Weekly and EnviroReporter.com have gone unanswered.

Ironically, considering that it lies partially under Barrington Dog Park, half the known dump is made up of the irradiated carcasses of animals killed in Cold War era experimentation at UCLA and the VA. Most of the animals were dogs with beagles being the preferred breed because of their agreeability.


While there is currently no evidence that human remains are in the dump, the VA and UCLA once participated in extensive human radiation testing and did have to contend with proper burial. As we wrote in “Where the Bodies are Buried,” records gleaned from the 1982 FOIA request to the VA indicate one 1964 meeting of the VA Center Radioisotope Committee that discussed “safe handling of cadavers containing radioactive isotopes.” The committee’s conclusions were blacked out by FOIA censors.

Other parts of this FOIA were blacked out but with an explanation. In a 1982 letter from the federal district counsel to the Los Angeles Federation of Scientists, which had submitted the FOIA request, the government wrote: “That information was withheld on the basis of potential employee misconduct leading to a civil and/or criminal investigation.”

Bodies or no bodies, nothing prepared us for the emotions that accompanied finding the VA’s atomic tombstones. The first impression was that they were graves but upon closer inspection it was clear they were dumped. A wave of sadness swept over me when thinking, “What if it were Pops?” My father Leo, a World War II Army veteran of the Pacific Theater, is buried at the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. The dull throb of loss gave way to incredulity – how could this happen and where did these tombstones come from?’

I was able to read most of one tombstone from the chain link fence on MacArthur Field bordering the dump, and went to Los Angeles National Cemetery on the other side of the VA, east of the 405 Freeway in Westwood. Around the side of the chapel there is a gravesite locator and map of the cemetery. Eventually, I was literally able to piece together the mystery of the broken headstone.

The wife of the man, whose surname was “Rodriquez”, had died. The VA cut a new tombstone, which I saw on the grave. But instead of destroying the old headstone, Rodriquez’s marble marker ended up dumped in the same ravine the VA had been dumping biomedical nuclear and chemical waste for twenty years.

This is not the only place tombstones were dumped on VA land. In one January 2000 document, the firm URS Greiner Woodward Clyde reported to the VA that headstones were found along with hospital syringes when building the drainage system for Brentwood School’s athletic fields.

Another piece of a tombstone was found embedded in the top of a mound in the dump that the VA said contained biomedical wastes from the excavation of Brentwood School’s athletic fields.

This broken tombstone piece imparts just part of an unknown soldier’s life. He was in the US Navy in World War I and died in January of an unknown year. That’s all that chunk of somebody’s life will tell.

There are pieces of veterans’ lives scattered on, and in, the hillside and a mound of Brentwood’s nuclear and chemical dump. Should the VA actually take the atomic tombstones out of the dump, it will mark the first time the VA has excavated in this troubled land that EnviroReporter.com and the LA Weekly continue to investigate.

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