Maimed in Iraq, then mistreated, neglected, and hidden in America.

By Frederick Sweet

Intervention

Combat veterans wounded in Iraq were left waiting weeks
and even months for proper medical attention at
military bases. According to an officer, their living
conditions were so unacceptable for injured soldiers he
said they "were being treated like dogs." Then the
Pentagon underreported the number wounded.

The Bush administration, referring to veterans of the
war in Iraq, told a House panel that they would avoid
last year’s "mistakes" of leaving sick and injured
troops at U.S. bases to wait for months to be properly
treated by doctors. Adding insult to injury, Army
Surgeon General Lt. Gen. James B. Peake told the House
panel that he "was not aware" that last fall soldiers
were waiting for medical care at U.S. bases and under
substandard living conditions.

Wounded "treated like dogs"

Mark Benjamin’s investigative report on Oct. 20, 2003
for UPI, revealed that many wounded veterans from Iraq
had to wait "weeks and months at places such as the
Fort Stewart military base in Georgia, for proper
medical help." They had been kept in living conditions
that are "unacceptable for sick and injured soldiers."
One officer characterized conditions for the wounded by
saying, "They’re being treated like dogs."

In January, 2004 Benjamin reported that the largest
American troop rotation is now underway. Daniel
Denning, assistant secretary of the Army, testified to
the House Total Force Subcommittee, "We recognize that
last fall, we temporarily lost sight of the situation.
It is likely that during this period of force
rotations, patient loads at some installations may
exceed local capacity. The Army has developed a series
of options to handle this surge."

Subcommittee chairman John McHugh, R-N.Y. said, "In
October of last year a series of articles revealed that
many mobilized Reserve and National Guard soldiers in a
medical holdover status felt the Army was not treating
them as equals to their active component counterparts.
The articles described substandard living conditions at
two Army posts in particular — Fort Stewart, Ga., and
Fort Knox, Ky. Many of the ill and injured soldiers
interviewed at these posts reported having to wait for
long periods of time — sometimes weeks or months —
before receiving the medical care they needed."

More than 1,000 National Guard and Army Reserve
soldiers at Fort Stewart and Fort Knox, including
hundreds who had served in Iraq, had waited weeks or
months in "medical hold" to be seen by doctors. At Fort
Stewart in Georgia, they waited in hot concrete
barracks with no air-conditioning or running water.

Sgt. Craig Allen LaChance, a soldier who was on medical
hold at Fort Stewart, told the panel that it "took
months to get appointments" with specialists while sick
and injured soldiers waited in what he said were
substandard barracks. "We lived in deplorable
conditions," LaChance said. "We were made to feel like
we had failed the Army."

Col. Keith Armstrong, garrison commander at Fort Knox,
told the congressional committee "we were stretched
pretty thin" last fall. Fort Stewart Garrison Commander
Col. John M. Kidd said, "We recognized that we had some
difficulty here. We recognized that we had a problem
with medical hold." Both commanders said they had asked
for help from the Army and both described it as slow in
coming.

How many wounded?

Combat deaths were accurately reported, but according
to an article in July, 2003 by Editor & Publisher
Online and later in October by National Public Radio,
the numbers of wounded, in and out of battle, were
being underreported. The news media had accepted that
the military high command kept the number of wounded
from the American public. "There could be some
inattention to [the number of injured troops],"
answered Philip Bennett, assistant managing editor of
the foreign desk at the Washington Post when questioned
by E & P Online.

As American casualties increased during the summer of
2003, US military officials suppressed discussion of
the total number wounded. Only by July 10, 2003, nearly
four months after the invasion of Iraq had been
launched, did CNN report that for "the first time since
the start of the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials have
released the number of US troops wounded from the
beginning of the war through Wednesday [July 9, 2003]."

However, Seth Porges wrote in Editor & Publisher
(10/23/03) that coverage of injured and wounded U.S.
soldiers gets very little media attention. "For months,
the press has barely mentioned non-fatal casualties or
the severity of their wounds," writes Porges. "Few
newspapers routinely report injuries in Iraq, beyond
references to specific incidents. Since the war began
in March, 1,927 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq,
many quite severely."

But newspapers neglected to report or keep a tally on
the wounded, as an informal survey of some top papers
has shown. This comes on the heels of reports that
attacks on American troops in Iraq had increased in
recent weeks from an average of 15 to 20 attacks per
day to about 20 to 25 attacks a day, with a peak at
about 35 attacks in one day, according to the commander
of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

Julian Borger, writing in the British Guardian last
August, cited the comments of Lieut. Col. Allen DeLane,
in charge of airlifting injured GIs into Andrews Air
Force Base near Washington. According to Bolger,
DeLane, who had already seen thousands of wounded flown
in, told National Public Radio, in regard to the sharp
increase in the number of US wounded last autumn, "the
official number of combat wounded alone averaged nearly
100 a week between mid-September and mid-November
(lunaville.org)." This made the resistance of the
military to giving out accurate figures increasingly
suspicious.

As the US media began to request injury figures, the
Pentagon put up as much resistance as it could. In
September, 2003, the Washington Post noted, "Although
Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded,
it releases the number only when asked" making the
combat injuries of US troops in Iraq one of the untold
stories in the war.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Intelligence Committee, had complained in
September 2003 that he was unable to find out how many
US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq because the
administration refused to release this information.

Higher Survival Rates

Because of the higher survival rate of injured soldiers
compared with previous wars, information about the
seriously wounded is essential to any accurate
assessment of the success of the war in Iraq.

But Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote in the October 13 New
Republic: "Pentagon officials have rebuked public
affairs officers who release casualty figures, and,
until recently, US Central Command did not regularly
publicize the injured total either."

Kaplan’s report cited the condition of many injured
soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, pointing
out that modern medicine and rapid response techniques
allow many wounded soldiers to survive injuries that
would otherwise have killed them in previous wars.
Kevlar body armor also reduced deaths. Still, many of
these wounded soldiers are left with debilitating
injury or loss of limbs.

Kaplan wrote: "The near-invisibility of the wounded has
several sources. The media has always treated combat
deaths as the most reliable measure of battlefield
progress, while for its part the administration has
been reluctant to divulge the full number of wounded."

Last December, Congressman Gene Taylor (Dem.-
Mississippi) complained that the Pentagon deliberately
undercounted combat casualties. He cited the case of
five members in the Mississippi National Guard who had
been wounded in a booby-trap bomb explosion.
Incredibly, their injuries were listed by the military
as "non combat." The truth emerged only because Taylor
spoke face to face with the most seriously injured of
the five at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in
Washington DC. Taylor sent a memo to the other members
of Congress to "ask if anyone has had a similar
incident."

On October 3rd UPI reported that 4,000 soldiers had
been medically evacuated from Iraq for non-combat
reasons. As for the tally of total deaths in Iraq, most
of the media continue to cite only those killed in
hostile action. The administration’s numbers game of
"combat" and "non combat" injuries, however, is far
from the whole story. That still leaves out the
thousands who have become physically or mentally ill in
Iraq not resulting from bombs and bullets. Estimates of
the real number of US servicemen and women evacuated
for medical reasons from Iraq by the end of 2003 vary
widely.

Last January 7, National Public Radio’s Daniel
Zwerdling reported on the difficulties in finding out
the truth about US casualties in Iraq. He said few
Americans are aware of the surprisingly large number of
US wounded in Iraq. Questioning several dozen people on
the street about the total number of American soldiers
who had died in Iraq, he had found that most could
answer correctly. But when the NPR reporter asked about
the number of US military personnel that had been
wounded, no one came close to the actual figure. The
answers ranged from a few hundred to a thousand.

The actual estimates are between 11,000 and 22,000 for
the number of US soldiers, sailors and Marines
medically evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003
because of battlefield wounds, illness or other
battlefield reasons.

Trying to get more accurate casualty figures, Zwerdling
said he contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel (Rep.-Nebraska), a
Vietnam veteran and former deputy administrator of the
Veterans Administration. Hagel had tried to obtain the
"total number of American battlefield casualties in
Afghanistan and Iraq" from Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. The senator had also tried to find out: "What
is the official Pentagon definition of wounded in
action? What is the procedure for releasing this
information in a timely way to the public and the
criteria for awarding a Purple Heart [awarded to those
wounded in combat or posthumously to the next of kin of
those killed or those who die of wounds received in
action]?"

Hagel had been seeking an accurate, updated count on
the number of Purple Hearts and the dates they were
awarded to US military personnel in Iraq. That number
is significant because it is an official record of the
total number of battlefield casualties. After six
weeks, the reply Hagel received was, "the Department of
Defense does not have the requested information."

Stars and Stripes (November 5, 2003 European edition)
noted that the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany
had "treated more than 7,000 injured and ill service
members from Iraq." But at the same time, the military
had recorded some 2,000 combat casualties. This
discrepancy is 3.5-times (350%) between the number of
wounded in combat listed by the military and the number
of service personnel medically evacuated from Iraq for
treatment in Germany!

The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge US air
base at Ramstein Germany, reported on January 23, 2004
that the total US medical evacuations from Iraq to
Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of
hostile and "non-hostile" wounded listed by the Army at
that point was approximately 2,750. The under reporting
of wounded continues.

Figures don’t lie, but . . .

Clearly, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld don’t really care
about the US servicemen and women casualties from their
war on Iraq. They rarely acknowledge it publicly.

But why did the Bush administration knock itself out to
conceal the number of combat veterans injured in Iraq?
Answer: To avoid the appearance of a Vietnam quagmire.
The seemingly low, "acceptable" number for American
loss of life in Iraq looks much better than Vietnam,
but the injury figures are much worse. That’s why.

The Bush administration claims an overwhelmingly
popular support for its war on Iraq. But the political
and media establishment can see that the public’s
opposition to the war is constantly growing. Like the
sensation caused by recent revelations of Bush being
AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972-73
during the Vietnam war, the tide of public opinion
would further turn if the true picture entered the
public mind of the war’s real effects on American
troops. But how can the "success" of Bush’s war be
measured?

Comparing the war in Iraq with that in Vietnam, the
total number of combat troops in Vietnam was 550,000.
As many as 155,000 of them were wounded while 10.7%
were killed during 10 years. In Iraq, so far, the total
number of combat troops total 150,000 and between
11,000 and 22,000 of them have been wounded during nine
months. Thus 28.2% of combat troops were wounded in
Vietnam while in Iraq "only" 0.3% died in combat, so
far, and as many as 14.7% had been wounded in combat.

At first glance, Bush’s war in Iraq seems to be much
more "successful" than the war in Vietnam — especially
when the number of wounded are eliminated from the
equation. The proportion of combat troops killed in
Vietnam appears to be 35-times more than in Iraq. By
contrast, the proportion of Vietnam wounded is only
two- times that sustained in Iraq. That’s getting
pretty close.

A fairer comparison of casualties in the Vietnam war,
lasting ten long years, and Iraq, now less than one
year old, should include how long each of the two wars
has lasted. While the war in Vietnam has been over for
more than three decades, American soldiers in Iraq are
still being killed and wounded on a daily basis. The
casualty figures in Iraq are still rising — and
there’s no end in sight.

Clearly, if Bush’s war continues for another two to
five years, according to most estimates, the casualty
figures from the Vietnam debacle could make it look
even more "successful" than Bush’s war!

With the specter of the Vietnam quagmire hanging over
them, Bush and Rumsfeld can only talk about a
"successful" war by emphasizing the relatively low
number of Americans killed in Iraq, and hiding the
extraordinarily high number of wounded. But for those
who had sacrificed their lives and limbs to
preemptively protect the U.S. against Saddam Hussein’s
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Bush’s war has
been a complete failure.

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in
Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your
comments to Fred@interventionmag.com

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