Last year, Eddie Peterson lost consciousness at his home in Memphis and stopped breathing.
His wife, Lori, saved his life, performing CPR on him until paramedics arrived.
Peterson has Parkinson's.
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His 76-year-old body is failing him, and has been for decades, but his mind is almost as sharp as when he was an assistant district attorney in Tennessee.
His speech is now slurred and stuttering. You can make out a few words here or there, but it's impossible to fully understand Peterson if you aren't familiar with him.
A man who made his living and forged his identity in the courtroom clocking 300 jury trials now struggles to get his point across, and even underwent an experimental surgery to implant a deep brain stimulator.
It helps, but we still have to check with Lori to make sure he said what we think he said.
"You've heard of friendly fire," Peterson said.
"This is friendly water. It should never happen again," he said.
Peterson's first stop out of law school was the military.
As a young man, serving as a judge advocate at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from 1975 to 1977, he was already ticking off two of his biggest goals in life: to work as a lawyer and to serve in the Marines.
He and as many as a million other young Marines, civillian staff and their family members who served and lived on base from 1953 to 1987 had no idea they were drinking, bathing their children and washing their clothes in water so contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and other contaminants that it would later be linked to 15 cancers and conditions, including bladder cancer, breast cancer, female infertility, miscarriage, kidney cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and neurobehavioral effects, including Parkinson's disease.
Internally, the Marine Corps confirmed there were dangerous chemicals in the water by the early 1980s but didn't alert many former residents of the base of even possible exposure until 1999.
In 2008, Congress forced the Marine Corps to notify exposed veterans and staff of the actual risk of the chemicals they had ingested.
By then, some were long gone, gravely ill or on their way, like Peterson, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2001 – a condition Lejeune veterans are 70 per cent more likely to have than veterans who served at a post across the country, according to a recent study.
More than a decade passed between Peterson's Parkinson's diagnosis and his realisation that it was connected to his stint at Lejeune, after he says he received a Lejeune-related health questionnaire from the Marine Corps in the mail.
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By then, North Carolina's statute of limitations for filing a claim had long expired, leaving Peterson and other potential plaintiffs without a legal path forward.
That changed one year ago, when President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act into law with much fanfare at a White House ceremony.
The bill provided benefits, most notably for post-9/11 veterans and surviving family members of those exposed to burn pits, but it also allowed Lejeune water victims the ability to file lawsuits against the government.
"It's a crime against humanity. It's a crime against everyone who was there who suffered like I have," Peterson said.
"Those that were in charge, they had a chance to stop it 20 years ago and they didn't do it, so they need to be held responsible for their misdeeds."
But while many veterans have already benefited from the PACT Act, lawsuits brought by Lejeune victims are proceeding at a crawl and, increasingly, becoming wrongful death claims.
