Among the thousands of victims of contaminated drinking water at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune was a woman with the ironic name of Mary Freshwater, who was raising her family at the North Carolina base in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when toxins in the water were at their peak.
Freshwater had two healthy children before she and her husband moved to Camp Lejeune, but while living in a section of the base called Paradise Point, she lost two infant boys to gruesome birth defects — one with an open spine and one without a cranium. She later gave up on expanding her family after having a miscarriage of twins.
