The List: Inside the Lejeune Justice Project's Fight for a Records Audit

The Lejeune Justice Project has no office and no staff beyond the two people who run it. It has a shared spreadsheet of other families' denials and a policy ask precise enough that congressional staffers have had a hard time saying no to a meeting. The ask is not new legislation. It is an audit: release what the VA has already approved case by case, and build the presumptive list from that record.

FEATURED STORYVETERANS’ CLAIMS CORNER

Camille D. Ford

9 min read

Luis Martinez Jr. and Lauren Merrell with their kids. Photo courtesy of Lauren Merrell.

The Lejeune Justice Project does not have an office. It does not have a staff beyond the two people who run it. What it has is a name picked over a text thread in the space of a day, a shared spreadsheet of other families' denials, and a policy ask precise enough that congressional staffers have had a hard time saying no to a meeting.

Lauren Merrell and her husband, Luis Martinez Jr., built the organization out of the case they built for Luis, a Marine who served at Camp Lejeune from 1984 to 1987 and was later diagnosed with oral cancer tied to the base's contaminated water. The couple's fight has already drawn outside attention. In May, Charlotte's NPR affiliate WFAE reported on the Project's push to overhaul the VA's presumptive conditions list, describing it as a grassroots effort to force federal policy to catch up with modern science. The same report quoted Martinez on the cost of the fight, noting that families are often left choosing between rebuilding a normal life and pursuing the benefits a veteran has already earned.

Luis Martinez Jr. in the hospital after his twelve-hour surgery. Photo courtesy of Lauren Merrell.

The Project itself is not a memoir. It is an argument, aimed at a specific gap in federal policy, and it runs on three tracks at once: a records request the VA has never had to answer, a peer network built one conversation at a time, and a push to get a category of loss acknowledged that has never had a name in any government report.

What the List Leaves Out

The presumptive list at the center of this fight has a specific history. In January 2017, the VA published a final rule establishing service connection for eight conditions tied to the water at Camp Lejeune, effective that March. The rule covers anyone who served at the base for at least 30 days between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987, the full span the government now recognizes as the contamination period. The eight covered diseases are adult leukemia, aplastic anemia and other myelodysplastic syndromes, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Parkinson's disease, according to VA public health records.

Oral cancer is not on that list, and neither, Merrell has learned, are several of the conditions the VA has already quietly approved for individual veterans who fought hard enough to get there. Esophageal cancer. Prostate cancer. Brain tumors. Conditions affecting the nervous system. Mental health diagnoses tied to the exposure. Each has won approval case by case. None is guaranteed to the next veteran who walks in with the same diagnosis.

The Project's core policy ask is not new legislation. It is an audit. Merrell wants the VA to release what it has already approved at the individual level and use that record, rather than a fresh round of negotiation, to build a longer and more honest presumptive list.

Two Generations, One Argument

Merrell has spent months studying how other advocacy movements inside the veteran community have moved policy, and the comparison she returns to most is the burn pit presumptive list, expanded under the PACT Act of 2022 to cover a far broader set of respiratory illnesses and cancers than Camp Lejeune veterans have ever been granted. She has a theory about why that fight moved faster.

“Maybe they mobilize differently,” she said. “I think by us hitting social media, expanding that demographic, the goal is to bring in beyond a veteran and military community. It's the American community.”

Part of that strategy is generational. Luis carries the Marine Corps network, the ability to walk into a room of veterans and be trusted immediately. Merrell carries the research instinct and the language for policy rooms. Together, she says, they can reach both an older veteran population and a younger one that found the Project through Instagram rather than a VFW hall.

She also compares the fight to a system she understands from a different corner of her life entirely, the structure built around a child's individualized education plan. That system runs on fixed timelines. Deadlines the school district cannot ignore. A framework designed, in her words, so no student gets left behind by accident. Nothing about the VA claims process works that way now, and closing that gap, not the lawsuit, not a settlement, is what she is actually asking Congress for.

Devil Dog, 93 to 97

A few weekends ago, at his son Harrison's baseball game, Luis noticed a man on the sideline with a look he has learned to spot anywhere. He introduced himself. The man had served at Camp Lejeune too, years after Luis, from 1993 to 1997, past the point most timelines mark as the contamination's official end.

Luis did not offer sympathy. He offered what he actually knows.

“I don't ever recall hearing about the base being shut down, or new plumbing going in,” he told him. “You can't just take part of something bad and think you can override it. Everything's got to be cleaned out.”

Then he did what the Project asks of every veteran it reaches, which is simple and unglamorous. Get looked at. Do not wait for symptoms to make the decision for you. This is the Lejeune Justice Project's real outreach model, not a media campaign but two men talking at a nine-year-old's baseball game, the same way a Marine friend once found Luis in his own living room days after surgery and asked the question that started all of this. The Project has just kept replicating that moment on purpose.

The Room on Capitol Hill

Part of the Project's work now happens in person, in meetings with members of Congress and their staff. Merrell walks in with photographs from Luis's surgery and recovery. She does not soften them.

Luis Martinez Jr. after surgery to remove his upper jaw, with a tracheostomy and the incision from his neck dissection. Photo courtesy of Lauren Merrell.

Editor's note: The photos below show Luis Martinez Jr. after surgery and may be difficult to view.

“I know I had one, personally, they were about to vomit,” she said of one meeting. “Not many people know about this surgery, and what oral cancer actually does to your body.”

Fifty Years, Not Thirty-Five

A separate problem sits inside the numbers themselves, and it is worth being precise about where those numbers come from. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act gave claimants a two-year window to sue the federal government, a window that closed in August 2024 after more than 400,000 claims had been filed, according to Stanford Law School's Center on the Legal Profession. Luis's diagnosis came seven months after that window shut.

Merrell's argument for reopening the conversation rests on a fifty-year latency period for oral cancer, a figure she has cited both in our interview and publicly, telling WFAE that toxic exposure can take up to fifty years to produce symptoms. It is worth noting for readers that this specific figure is Merrell's own research finding and advocacy position, not a number the VA or the peer-reviewed literature has formally adopted. A federal review of Camp Lejeune health outcomes found insufficient evidence to establish a clear link between solvent exposure and oral cancer specifically, and general latency periods for most solid tumors are cited elsewhere in the range of four to twenty years. What is not in dispute is that Luis was thirty-seven years removed from his service at Camp Lejeune when his diagnosis came, well outside the lawsuit's filing window and, by Merrell's own account, still within range of the exposure that caused it.

Baby Heaven

The piece of this fight Merrell says she will not walk away from has nothing to do with her own family's claim, and everything to do with what she found while researching everyone else's.

Pregnant women lived at Camp Lejeune during the contamination years, drinking and bathing in the same water, often in the base housing hit hardest by the toxins. The scale of what followed has its own name in the reporting that has already been done on it. A section of a cemetery near the base became known as Baby Heaven, where NBC News and other outlets have documented that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of infants lost to miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects were buried, some graves holding more than one child. Women who lived through it have told reporters their losses were dismissed for decades. One veteran who suffered a stillbirth and nine miscarriages put it simply to NBC News: “It's like we're invisible.” Many of the medical records from that period, attorneys handling the related lawsuits have said, are gone.

“I'm not walking away,” Merrell said. “I'm not going to be quiet until that is acknowledged in a real way.”

She wants a physical acknowledgment, something in Washington, something in Jacksonville, North Carolina, near the base itself. Not a settlement. A recognition that those children existed and that their loss was never separate from the contamination story, just left out of it.

What Winning Looks Like

Asked what success looks like in the next twelve to twenty-four months, Merrell does not reach for something abstract. She names two things: an expanded presumptive list built from the VA's own approval data, and formal acknowledgment of the infants lost at Camp Lejeune.

Behind both asks sits the same organizing idea that gave the project its name. Luis, a Marine who still believes in the Corps even as he questions the bureaucracy that failed to protect him, put it simply when asked what he would say to the VA employee who approved his own claim.

“Approve more claims,” he said. “Thanks for doing the right thing.”

That is the whole ask, scaled from one household to every family the Lejeune Justice Project has met since. It is not asking the VA for sympathy. It is asking the agency to look at its own records and be consistent with itself, case by case, family by family, until the list finally matches what the water actually did.

Luis Martinez Jr.'s leg after surgeons harvested bone and skin to rebuild his mouth. Photo courtesy of Lauren Merrell.

The response so far has surprised her. Staffers have followed up between meetings. One senator's office checked in on her family directly, unprompted, when a scheduling issue came up with Luis's care. She is careful about what she is actually requesting in these rooms. Not a settlement, not a sweeping overhaul. A review process, built off records the VA already has.

The graft site on Luis Martinez Jr.'s leg, where surgeons harvested bone and skin to rebuild his mouth. Photo courtesy of Lauren Merrell.

Resources

VA Camp Lejeune Benefits | https://www.va.gov/camplejeune/

The VA's hub for Camp Lejeune disability and health care benefits, including benefits for family members who lived on the base.

ATSDR Camp Lejeune Public Health Activities | https://atsdr.cdc.gov/camp-lejeune/about/public-health-activities.html

The federal health studies on Camp Lejeune's contaminated water, including research on cancers and on pregnancy outcomes for mothers who lived on the base.

The PACT Act and Your VA Benefits | https://www.va.gov/resources/the-pact-act-and-your-va-benefits/

How the 2022 PACT Act added more than 20 presumptive conditions for burn pits and other toxic exposures.

VA Freedom of Information Act | https://www.va.gov/foia

How to request VA records under FOIA, which gives anyone a right to federal agency records unless an exemption applies.

Board of Veterans' Appeals Decision Search | https://search.usa.gov/search/docs?affiliate=bvadecisions

Search past appeals decisions by condition or keyword to see which evidence and arguments have won similar claims.

Congress.gov | https://www.congress.gov/

Enter your address under Contact Your Member to find your senators and representative and how to reach their offices.

Veterans Crisis Line | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/

Free, confidential support 24/7 for veterans, service members, and the people who love them. Call 988 and press 1, or text 838255.

Sources

Reporting for this piece draws on original interviews with Lauren Merrell and Luis Martinez Jr., alongside VA public health records on the Camp Lejeune presumptive conditions rule (effective March 14, 2017), WFAE/NPR reporting on the Lejeune Justice Project (May 2026), Stanford Law School's Center on the Legal Profession on the Camp Lejeune Justice Act filing window, and NBC News reporting on Camp Lejeune miscarriage and stillbirth cases and the Baby Heaven cemetery. This note is for editorial reference and can be removed before publication.

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