Lacy Hollings watched the billowing black smoke rise a hundred feet from her door and sensed a disaster waiting to happen. It was 2006, and she had been deployed to the Ghazi province in Afghanistan as an interrogator and linguist with the United States army. Every day, the dark cloud lingered, stinging her eyes, charring her lungs, and making it difficult to breathe.
What Hollings was seeing was a burn pit, an area roughly the size of a basketball court where all the waste from the base – human sewage, food, tires and metal – was discarded, doused in fuel, and then set on fire with a match. It had a pungently chemical smell and would sizzle and crackle.
