The military's record in Western Europe, given the relatively high environmental awareness among governments and publics there, raises troubling questions about its behavior in less developed regions. U.S. forces have operated on a large scale for years in such places as South Korea, the Philippines, Central America and Southeast Asia, where environmental regulation is embryonic at best.
In the few instances when environmental issues have emerged in these parts of the world, the news has been bad.
Public health officials in Guam discovered that the Air Force had dumped large quantities of the cleaning solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected human carcinogen, onto the ground and into storm drains, contaminating the water table that supplies three-quarters of the Pacific island's population with drinking water. Tests showed TCE levels at some points in the aquifer to be six times the permissible limit.
Investigators found that the Air Force had 20 suspected contaminated sites on the small island, a U.S. territory, while the Navy had at least seven and possibly 34 sites. The Navy's illegal dumping and improper handling of toxic wastes contaminated soil at the Naval Complex on Guam and polluted the shoreline and ocean, the General Accounting Office found.
The situation may be worse in the Philippines, where the United States maintains two huge military installations, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base.
An Air Force official in Washington, questioned about environmental compliance at Clark, said there is no legal mandate to assess ecological damage on the sprawling base and no such survey has been done. He added: "We comply with host country laws. In the Philippines, there are none, so we are not in violation of any."
Said Berteau: "There is no reason to believe that the activities at Subic were any better than at U.S. facilities" in this country. Comparable Navy yards in the United States are among the worst sites on the Superfund list.
"If there's a horror story out there," Berteau said, "Subic may be it."
With the threat of a Soviet-led invasion of Western Europe evaporating and the U.S. defense budget contracting, the United States is planning to close dozens of bases in Europe and return thousands of troops, tanks and aircraft to America. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies must now wrestle with the delicate questions of how much pollution the departing U.S. forces caused and who should pay to repair it.
"When the threat was perceived to be high, we could do virtually anything," said David Lange, chief of intergovernment relations for the U.S. Army in Europe. Now, he said, European governments are beginning to demand compliance with their environmental laws and insist that the United States shoulder the cost of returning military facilities to safe and usable condition.
"Clearly, there has been a double standard when it comes to overseas projects," said David Wirth, a former State Department attorney now on the staff of the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council.
"There is always a severe foreign policy risk in that. We want to maintain good relations with countries where we had bases and are now turning them over. To hand over environmental problems we wouldn't tolerate ourselves is a ripe area for a foreign policy crisis," he said.
The German people are just now becoming aware of the extent of lasting damage caused by the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops based in West Germany since the end of the World War II.
There are currently 255,000 American troops stationed at about 1,000 installations in West Germany.
"The Americans, they see Germany as a U.S. military-industrial laboratory," said Olaf Achilles, founder of a small organization in Bonn that monitors the environmental behavior of the United States, West Germany and other NATO militaries.
"Every German environmental law exempts the military, and the local authorities know very little about what goes on on U.S. bases. Our government is so stupid and blind to all this," Achilles said.
The 28-year-old urban planner noted the environmental record of the military in the United States as documented by the Defense Environmental Restoration Program. "Now they know what they've done wrong in the United States," Achilles said. "They've done much more wrong outside of the United States."
West Germans Upset
Another West German citizen, Wilma Herzog of nearby Gerolstein, expressed disappointment that the United States, where she lived for 12 years, has treated the German people and the German countryside with such apparent disregard for so long.
"I feel sadness and shock that America has such a dark side," said Herzog, 55, who is organizing a citizens group to address low-level flying and other military intrusions.
"They are destroying the environment and torturing the people," Herzog said. "I thought the Americans were smarter than this. I thought the Americans were better than this."
