Dutcher's A W Sons Funeral Home

He kept talking about the steel barrels. They haunted him, sea monsters plaguing an old sailor.Related News/Archive"We turned off all the lights," George Albernaz testified at a 2005 Department of Veterans Affairs hearing, "and … pretend that we were broken down and … we would take these barrels and having only steel-toed shoes … no protection gear, and proceed to roll these barrels into the ocean, 300 barrels at a trip."Not all of them sank. A few pushed back against the frothing ocean, bobbing in the waves like a drowning man. Then shots would ring out from a sailor with a rifle at the fantail. And the sea would claim the bullet-riddled drum.Back inside the ship, Albernaz marked in his diary what the sailors dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. He knew he wasn't supposed to keep such a record, but it was important to Albernaz that people know he had spoken the truth, even when the truth sounded crazy.For up to 15 years after World War II, the crew of Albernaz's ship, the USS Calhoun County, dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste into the Atlantic Ocean, often without heeding the simplest health precautions, according to Navy documents and Tampa Bay Times interviews with more than 50 former crewmen.Albernaz began a battle for his life in 1988 when part of his brain began to die, mystifying doctors who eventually concluded the rare ailment might be linked to radiation. He filed a VA claim for benefits in 2001 that was repeatedly rejected, often with tortured government reasoning.The VA and Navy told Albernaz he was not exposed to radiation on the Calhoun County, a vessel the Navy ordered sunk in 1963 because it was radioactive. The VA ignored Navy documents discovered by a former congressional aide proving the ship's radioactivity, telling Albernaz they were "unsubstantiated." And the Navy today points to Cold War records that are incomplete and unreliable as proof crewmen were not exposed to dangerous radiation.The Navy and VA's insistence that atomic waste on the Calhoun County was not dangerous comes 1... (Tampabay.com)