The War Comes Home: Covering the Plight of the Badly Wounded

[RamboLiberal]

A week ago a Lancaster mother -- one of the soldier-mothers in my hometown in Southern California -- left to tend to her wounded son at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. How much the world has changed for Stacie Tscherny in the span of that one week.

Days earlier, she learned that her son, Army Spc. Jerral Steele Hancock, was seriously wounded in the fighting around Baghdad.

It was Memorial Day. It was his 21st birthday. This birthday, this crossing of the bridge into formal adulthood with the privilege to drink a legal beer would herald the last time Spc. Hancock would have two arms. And it would be the last time he would take a normal step or experience physical comfort or ease.

Serving as a tanker with the 1st Squadron, 8th Cavalry, Spc. Hancock was catastrophically wounded in an explosion that hit his armored vehicle. The vast majority of traumatic injuries inflicted in the Iraq war are not from gunfire, but from explosives.

In January the military marked the 500th American surviving with wounds that involved amputation.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003596812

[Ezlivin]

1. Exchanging death for a disability

Here's how the new PR works.

First you tout the effectiveness of our battlefield hospitals. You spend hundreds of millions of dollars building state-of-the-art MASH units that can keep a soldier from dying.

Then you move the wounded soldier off the battlefield as soon as possible.

If he/she dies en route, it's not a battlefield causality. If he/she doesn't die, then you get to spend millions more for rehab.

End result? The administration can claim it's doing a lot for the soldiers when in reality all it wants to do is to keep the "bad" numbers (deaths) down while ignoring the huge numbers of wounded.

I'm just waiting for the VA hospital system to collapse. Since it's the source of all my health care, it's not a comforting thought.

[RamboLiberal]

2. According to Iraq Coalition Casualties the Out of Theater

Deaths are counted.

The following is a list of U.S. Fatalities who have died in hospitals in Germany and The United States. Some have claimed that The Department of Defense does not report these deaths, they are obviously mistaken.
Note: these deaths are included in our overall totals.

http://icasualties.org/oif/Dow.aspx

[Ezlivin]

4. Okay, that does make a difference

But I think that their push to "save" as many lives as possible is resulting in an incredible number of disabled survivors.

And many of these we will never see; if you've been through a VA lately you know that it can appear much like a horror show. What these people will do for a living if they survive is a big question. Is Wal-Mart going to hire a guy with half his face gone as a greeter? Not likely...

[NMDemDist2]

3. 500 amputees?

I'm grateful to hear the number is that low. I thought with the 3500 dead and the many thousands wounded that figure would be much higher.