Day: December 8, 2004

Perhaps the most deserving and most unheralded story of the current war is the astonishing success of the military’s medical cadre.

For every American soldier killed in Iraq, nine others have been wounded and survived — the highest rate of any war in U.S. history. It isn’t that their injuries were less serious, a new report says. In fact, some young soldiers and Marines have had faces, arms and legs blown off and are now returning home badly maimed.

But they have survived thanks, in part, to armor-like vests and fast treatment from doctors on the move with surgical kits in backpacks.

“This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who researched military medicine and wrote about it in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

….

By mid-November, 10,369 American troops had been wounded in battle in Afghanistan or Iraq, and 1,004 had died — a survival rate of roughly 90 percent. In the Vietnam War, one in four wounded died, virtually all of them before they could reach MASH units some distance from the fighting.

Please go read this examination of the effects of advancements in both the protection of soldiers and the treatment of casualties. The story also highlights the courage, determination and skill of our medical personnel. I’ve never met a medic I didn’t like. Apparently, it’s a calling that summons a better, stronger person than I am.

There is the other side of the story, though.

“This war is producing unique injuries — less lethal but more traumatic,” he said.

In one traumatic case, Gawande tells of an airman who lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. “How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question,” Gawande writes.

We now face a new generation of injured combat veterans, many of whom would not have survived their wounds in times past. We, as a nation, must welcome and care for them. We must thank them and help them hold on to their humanity and rebuild their lives.

We owe that to them. And to their caregivers.

In a time of war, this disgusts me on many levels.

In a rare public airing of grievances, disgruntled soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment.

“You go to war with the Army you have,” Rumsfeld replied, “not the Army you might want or wish to have.”

Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.

“We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson, 31, of Nashville, Tenn., concluded after asking again.

Wilson, an airplane mechanic whose unit, the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard, is about to drive north into Iraq for a one-year tour of duty, put his finger on a problem that has bedeviled the Pentagon for more than a year. Rarely, though, is it put so bluntly in a public forum.

First, media coverage of such an event should be better controlled, if not completely banned. I have no problem with top brass getting feedback from the lower echelons, but this should be an opportunity to exchange information, concerns and reassurances, not a chance to create political footballs. That was the fault of those in charge.

The soldier’s question was out of line in a public forum. Grumbling and complaining are more than a soldier’s right — they’re practically an obligation. However, said grumbling and complaining is not to be done in a manner to cast an ill effect upon morale. Especially in a war zone. Rumsfeld’s response was correct — ya fight with what ya got. We fought in World War II with tanks tragically inferior to those of the Germans. Such shortcomings are made up for in other areas until they can be feasibly addressed. This improper questioning, this verbal poison, was the fault of the soldier. Why did it have to be a freakin’ Guardsman?!

As to the “shouts of approval and applause,” I saw video of this and, while some shouting and clapping occurred, it was a very small percentage of those present. That this was presented in the manner above was an attempt to politicize and enhance the negativity of the story. That is the fault of the media.

What is the actual armor situation?

Rumsfeld said the Army was sparing no expense or effort to acquire as many Humvees and other vehicles with extra armor as it can. What is more, he said, armor is not the savior some think it is.

“You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can (still) be blown up,” he said. The same applies to the much smaller Humvee utility vehicles that, without extra armor, are highly vulnerable to the insurgents’ weapon of choice in Iraq, the improvised explosive device that is a roadside threat to Army convoys and patrols.

U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq are killed or maimed by roadside bombs almost daily. Adding armor protection to Humvees and other vehicles that normally are not used in direct combat has been a priority for the Army, but manufacturers have not been able to keep up with the demand.

…

At the Pentagon, spokesman Larry Di Rita said production of armored Humvees had increased from 15 to 450 a month since fall 2003, when commanders in Iraq started asking for them because of insurgents’ heavy use of roadside explosives.

Overall, there are 19,000 armored Humvees in the Iraqi theater. Some were built with additional armor, others had it added on later. That’s, 2,000 short of what commanders are asking for, Di Rita acknowledged.

Military policy is that troops driving into Iraq in Humvees drive only in armored ones, Di Rita said. Some $1.2 billion has been included in the defense budget to pay for armored vehicles, he said.

Any other complaints, troops, while you have the SecDef and the cameras here?

Wilson and others, however, had criticisms of their own — not of the war but of how it was being fought.

During the question-and-answer session, another soldier complained that active-duty Army units seem to get priority over National Guard and Reserve units for the best equipment used in Iraq.

“There’s no way I can prove it, but I am told the Army is breaking its neck to see that there is not” discrimination of that kind, Rumsfeld said.

Shut up, do your job and quit embarrassing the Guard and Reserves. Regarding this and other such embarrassments, Stryker has created an entire Reservist category on his Digital Warfare site. As a former Guardsman, I don’t blame him one freaking iota.