Illinois Veterans and Asbestos: From Great Lakes Boot Camp to the Fleet, Chanute and the Ordnance Plants

VA counted 552,775 veterans living in Illinois at the end of fiscal year 2023.

Ask an Illinois Navy veteran where asbestos entered their life and the honest answer is rarely “Illinois.” It is a fire room, an engine room or a shipyard overhaul, often a thousand miles from Lake Michigan. What Illinois gave them was the training and the rating that sent them there. That rating is now one of the most useful pieces of evidence they own.

Illinois also has history of its own, on dry land: an Air Corps mechanics school at Rantoul, two World War II ordnance plants outside Joliet, and a working Army arsenal on an island in the Mississippi. Each one is covered below.

Free, accredited help with an Illinois claim

Before the history, the practical part. Two kinds of help are free to an Illinois veteran, and both come before anyone asks you to sign anything.

Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs service officers

IDVA runs full-time and part-time service offices across the state. Its Veteran Service Officers, in the department’s words, “are trained and accredited by the US Department of Veterans Affairs” and provide “free assistance to veterans and their dependents and survivors.” The department’s county list shows the office nearest you: IDVA VSO locator.

VA’s own list of accredited representatives

Under federal law only an accredited attorney, claims agent or Veterans Service Organization representative may prepare or present a VA claim. VA keeps a public search tool for them, and says the services an accredited VSO representative provides on a benefit claim “are always free.” Find an accredited representative on VA.gov.

What we do, and do not do

If you want your evidence file assembled before you sit down with a representative, we do that at no cost: service history, ship or shore station, occupational specialty, and the medical records that tie the diagnosis to exposure. The file goes to a VA-accredited representative, who files and presents the claim. We do not file claims, and we do not charge.

Where Illinois veterans file and get diagnosed

Benefits. The Chicago VA Regional Benefit Office is at 2122 W. Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 60612, open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It takes in-person and virtual appointments booked through VA’s VERA portal. Expect a security screening with a valid ID that meets Real ID rules. Bring your DD214, relevant medical records and your dependents’ dates of birth and Social Security numbers; the office says it can also request documents for you.

Getting there: fee parking is in the garage east of the office, entered from Taylor Street between Ogden and Damen, and in the Juvenile Detention Center garage on Hamilton Avenue to the south. There is free and metered street parking nearby, and VA does not validate. Chicago area veterans may qualify for a Military Service Pass that lets them ride Chicago public transit free.

Medical care. The diagnosis and the doctor’s statement usually come from one of these:

Lovell is worth knowing about for this audience in particular. VA lists it twice, once as a VA facility and once as a TRICARE facility, and its own page reports Navy Medicine Readiness and Training Command Great Lakes holding a change of command there. It is the hospital next door to boot camp, shared by active duty sailors and veterans.

Great Lakes: why your rate matters more than your boot camp

A board of Navy officers chose the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan for a training station in 1902, and Great Lakes opened on 1 July 1911. More than 125,000 sailors trained there in World War I. Of the more than four million Americans who served in the Navy between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender, one million were trained at Great Lakes. In a single week in 1951, during the Korean War, it graduated 98 companies of recruits, equal to its World War II record, and the Vietnam years brought another surge. After the 1993 base closure round, it became the Navy’s only recruit training command.

Great Lakes also ran the schools that followed boot camp. The first class of its Class A Service School began on 9 December 1940. That is the step that turned a recruit into a rated sailor with a specialty, and sent them to a ship. A Machinist’s Mate ‘A’ School still runs at Great Lakes today.

What VA actually asks for

VA’s asbestos page lists three things a claim needs: medical records that state the condition, service records that list your job or specialty, and a doctor’s statement connecting your contact with asbestos in service to that condition. It also lists shipyards and insulation among the work it tells veterans to get tested for.

For a Great Lakes graduate that middle item is the rating on your DD214 and the ships in your service record. A boot camp barracks at Great Lakes is a weak place to start a claim. An engine room on a destroyer is a strong one. If you trained at Great Lakes, build your history around where the Navy sent you next.

Illinois installations, and what the record shows about each

What that means for a claim

• Chanute. Mechanics’ work is where friction products come in: VA names clutch facings and brake linings among the products it tells veterans to be tested for. If your Chanute training or your later assignments put you on brakes and clutches, say so.
• Joliet. Most of what happened at Joliet was production and loading work, and most of its buildings date to World War II. For anyone who was there as a civilian employee, that history belongs to the trust side, not the VA side, because VA compensation only reaches time spent in service.
• Rock Island. The same split applies. A soldier assigned there has a service history; a civilian machinist has a work history. Both can matter, through different doors.

Inclusion of a site reflects its documented history. It does not establish that any individual was exposed. Exposure depends on your job, where you worked on the installation, and your years there.

Matching an Illinois history to the products involved

Bankruptcy trusts pay according to whose product you were exposed to, so the useful question is which kind of material your work put you near.

A case review matches each category to the specific trusts set up by the companies that made those products.

How long you have in Illinois

Illinois puts a time limit on asbestos injury lawsuits and a separate one on wrongful death claims brought by a family. Two points do not depend on the exact number of years:

• Your diagnosis date is what starts the count, not the year you left the ship. VA’s public health office puts the gap between exposure and symptoms at 20 to 50 years, which is exactly why the law does not run from exposure.
• A VA claim is not a lawsuit and does not share its deadline. Being past one limit does not by itself close the other door.

If Great Lakes was your only time in Illinois

Most people who passed through Great Lakes did not stay. They spent a few weeks in boot camp or a few months in an A school and then went to the fleet. If that describes you, this page is still about you; your claim simply points at the ships you served on rather than at Illinois. The same is true in the other direction: a veteran who settled in Illinois after serving elsewhere files here with a history built somewhere else. Your service record and your diagnosis decide the claim. Your address does not.

Talk to someone about your service history

We can help you line up your rating, your ships and your diagnosis, and work out which of them supports a VA claim and which supports a trust claim. There is no cost to speak with us.

Call (800) 763-9692

Questions Illinois veterans ask

I only went through boot camp at Great Lakes. Is there anything there for me?
Probably not on its own. What matters is what came after: your rating and the ships or shore stations you were assigned to. Bring those to the conversation.

I trained as a mechanic at Chanute. Does aircraft or vehicle work count?
It can. VA lists clutch facings and brake linings among the products linked to asbestos illness. That kind of work points toward friction product trusts rather than insulation trusts.

I worked at the Joliet ammunition plant but I was never in the military.
Then the VA side does not apply to you, but trust claims are not limited to veterans. They pay for exposure to their products regardless of who signed your paycheck.

My wife’s father served at Rock Island and later died of mesothelioma. Can the family file?
A surviving spouse or dependent may qualify for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from VA and may be able to file trust claims. The timing rules for a family filing after a death differ from those for a living claimant.

Does a trust payment reduce my VA compensation?
No. Trusts are funded by the manufacturers’ bankruptcy estates, not by the VA. They are separate systems.

Sources for this page

• Veteran population, Illinois, FY2023: VA Open Data Portal
• Naval Station Great Lakes: Naval History and Heritage Command
• Chanute AFB: Illinois EPA, Chanute AFB Fact Sheet 3
• Chanute asbestos assessments: Air Force Civil Engineer Center, Former Chanute AFB Environmental Update (May 2015)
• Joliet landfill contents: EPA Record of Decision (1998)
• Great Lakes Machinist’s Mate A School: DVIDS (December 2024)
• Joliet Army Ammunition Plant: USDA Forest Service, Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie
• Rock Island Arsenal: U.S. Army and “Arsenal of Democracy”, army.mil
• Chicago VA Regional Benefit Office: va.gov
• VA health care systems: VA.gov facility data
• VA asbestos exposure eligibility and evidence: va.gov
• Latency of asbestos disease: VA Public Health
• Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Veteran Service Officers: veterans.illinois.gov; VSO locator by county
• VA, accredited representatives and VSOs: va.gov; search tool: Find a VA accredited representative or VSO