In disposing of its wastes, the Defense Department both in the United States and overseas has followed what it calls "the commonly accepted practices of the times." Those practices included, according to Pentagon documents, "discharge on the ground into unlined pits . . . or local creeks," "pouring and spraying on the ground," "drainage to industrial sewers," "burning during fire protection training" and "storage in leaking underground tanks."
The result: thousands of sites where toxic pollution has poisoned drinking water, killed fish and birds, befouled the air and rendered vast tracts of land unusable for generations.
Some severely contaminated Defense Department sites have become "national sacrifice zones," permanently fenced and guarded against any human use.
Hermann Schafer, a brewery worker who lives in the town of Rohl, a scant three miles from Bitburg Air Base, complains that human waste, oil, solvents and firefighting foam from the base have over the years poured into the Rohlbach, the stream that winds through the village, killing fish, vegetation, even insects.
"Pipelines from the base end in this formerly natural brook, making it more or less a sewer," he said recently. "Nothing can live in it."
The base only last year completed a new sewage treatment plant after years of complaints from West German authorities about pollution of the Rohl creek and several other nearby streams.
The base, home of 72 F-15 Eagle fighters, also imposes high-decibel pollution in the form of deafening day and night jet noise, Schafer complained. Base officers said the jets take off and land 150 times a day in good flying weather and practice low-level flying over a wide swath of central West Germany.
The Air Force, with no trace of irony, calls jet noise "The Sound of Freedom." Schafer and others call it "air terror" and consider it an affront to West German sovereignty.
"The citizens are sick and tired of Americans eating up more and more land and putting a burden on them of 24-hour-a-day noise," said Schafer, 52. "We have a right to human health in our constitution, and it is constantly stepped on by the Americans."
The full extent of the military's overseas pollution remains shrouded in secrecy, the result of a deliberate U.S. government attempt to conceal data on the problem.
The only congressional audit on the subject, a 1986 study which uncovered significant toxic contamination at U.S. bases in West Germany, Italy and England, was quickly stamped secret by the Pentagon and the State Department because of the potential diplomatic fallout. Publicizing the information, officials argued, could affect sensitive negotiations on the return of leased facilities to host countries, which are expected to demand that the United States undertake costly cleanups.
Officials also worry that evidence of severe pollution at overseas bases might intensify calls--already being heard in West Germany, Greece, Spain and the Philippines--for the Yankees to pack up their noisy, dirty weaponry and go home.
A second congressional study, now being prepared, is also expected to be classified for national security reasons. Officials familiar with the report said, however, that there has been little improvement in the situation in the four years between the two studies.
In response to requests by The Times under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act for data on contamination at specific foreign bases, the Air Force said it could not meet the law's legal deadline and would provide some information at an unspecified future date. The Navy did not respond at all.
An internal Pentagon memorandum obtained by The Times called hazardous waste contamination in Europe "an emerging political issue" and "a serious budget problem."
According to the memo, prepared after a visit in late 1988 to West Germany by a senior Pentagon environmental official, "the Air Force has been hesitant to identify and investigate sites because of the potential political ramifications. They have a technical-political dilemma. If they identify sites, do nothing and the Germans find out, they have problems. If they don't do anything and the Germans identify (that) the pollution exists, they have problems."
The memo noted that then-U.S. Ambassador to West Germany Richard R. Burt proposed to address the problem by "lobbying the press 'much like the military lobbies Congress' to give them good stories to print about military pollution abatement and maneuver damage minimization efforts."
Some German officials, however, consider American pollution of their country to be more than a mere public relations nuisance.
