- The Bush administration is deliberately concealing from
the American people the number and condition of US military personnel who
have been wounded in Iraq. The efforts by those few politicians and media
figures who have pursued the issue make this clear.
-
- Estimates on the number of US soldiers, sailors and Marines
medically evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 because of battlefield
wounds, illness or other reasons range from 11,000 to 22,000, a staggering
figure by any standard. Thousands of these young men and women have been
physically or psychologically damaged for life, in turn affecting the lives
of tens of thousands of family members and others. And the war in Iraq
is less than one year old.
-
- A recent piece by Daniel Zwerdling on National Public
Radio (January 7) highlighted some of the difficulties in establishing
the truth about US casualties. Zwerdling began by noting that few Americans
seemed aware of the large number of US wounded in Iraq. He questioned a
few dozen people on the street about the total number of American soldiers
who had died in Iraq, and most answered more or less correctly. However,
when the NPR correspondent asked about the number of US military personnel
who have had to be evacuated with wounds, no one was close to the actual
figure. The answers ranged from a few hundred to a thousand.
-
- Zwerdling set about finding the actual number by contacting
the appropriate government and military offices. A spokesman for Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told him to call US Central Command in Tampa,
Florida. A spokesman there informed him that only Rumsfeld's office had
such information. A spokesman for the Army provided with him the number
of its personnel wounded seriously enough to be evacuated out of Iraq by
the end of 2003 - 8,848 - but he had no figures on Marines, Navy Seals
or other forces. The United States Medical Command told Zwerdling they
were still searching for the numbers.
-
- Zwerdling contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel (Republican-Nebraska),
a Vietnam veteran and former deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration.
Hagel explained that he had been trying to obtain certain information from
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, including the "total number of American
battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. 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]?"
-
- The Nebraska senator also wanted an updated tally on
the number of US military personnel who had received Purple Hearts and
the dates they were awarded. Six weeks later, Hagel received the provocative
reply: the Department of Defense did not have the requested information.
-
- The information on the number of Purple Hearts awarded
is significant because it speaks to the total number of battlefield casualties.
-
- In December, Mississippi Democratic congressman Gene
Taylor raised the possibility that the Pentagon was deliberately undercounting
combat casualties when he brought to light the case of five members of
the Mississippi National Guard who were wounded in a booby-trap bomb explosion,
but whose injuries were listed as "noncombat" by the military.
The truth emerged only because Taylor happened to speak to the most seriously
injured of the five at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Taylor
indicated that he would send a memo to the other members of Congress "and
ask if anyone has had a similar incident."
-
- Other commentators have noted the discrepancy between
the number of wounded in combat listed by the military and the large number
of service personnel medically evacuated from Iraq, an action, one would
imagine, that the military does not encourage or take lightly. In passing,
for example, an article in the November 5 European edition of Stars and
Stripes noted that the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany had "treated
more than 7,000 injured and ill servicemembers from Iraq." At that
time, the military had recorded some 2,000 combat casualties.
-
- The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge Ramstein
US airbase, reported January 23 that the total of US medical evacuations
from Iraq to Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of hostile
and "non-hostile" wounded by that point listed by the Army was
approximately 2,750.
-
- Julian Borger in the Guardian last August noted the odd
imbalance between combat and "non-combat" deaths and injuries.
He cited the comments of Lieut. Col. Allen DeLane, in charge of airlifting
the wounded into Andrews air force base near Washington, who had already
seen thousands of wounded flown in and who told National Public Radio,
according to Bolger, "90 percent of injuries were directly war-related."
-
- US casualties mount
-
- As casualties mounted last summer, US military officials
did their best to suppress any discussion of the wounded total in particular.
Only on July 10, almost four months after the launch of the invasion, CNN
reported 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]."
-
- In keeping the number of wounded from the public, the
military high command was aided by the American media. Editor & Publisher
Online observed in July that while deaths in combat were being reported,
the many non-combat deaths were virtually ignored and the numbers of wounded,
in and out of battle, were being under-reported. Questioned by E &
P Online, Philip Bennett, Washington Post assistant managing editor of
the foreign desk, acknowledged blandly that "There could be some inattention
to [the number of injured troops]."
-
- The sharp increase in the number of US wounded in the
autumn - the official number of combat wounded alone averaged nearly 100
a week between mid-September and mid-November (lunaville.org) - made the
reluctance of the military to provide figures increasingly problematic.
Even the servile US media was beginning to request figures. Still the Pentagon
officialdom put up as much resistance as it could.
-
- In September 2003, the Post itself 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, one-time candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination and ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, declared around the same time that he wanted to know how many
US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq, but had been unable to find out because
the administration would not release the information.
-
- An article in the October 13 New Republic by Lawrence
F. Kaplan noted: "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." Ten days later,
however, E & P Online commented, "Current injury statistics were
easily obtained...through US Central Command and the Pentagon, so getting
the numbers is no longer a problem."
-
- In that same New Republic piece, Kaplan discussed the
state of many injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He pointed
out that modern medical technique meant that a far higher percentage of
wounded soldiers now survived who would have died in previous wars. The
use of Kevlar body armor had also reduced deaths. The result, however,
was that many of the wounded were left with debilitating injuries, particularly
amputated limbs. Because of the higher survival rate, information about
the seriously wounded is essential to any accurate picture of the Iraq
war.
-
- 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."
-
- The number of "combat injuries," however, is
far from the whole story. That leaves out the thousands who have become
physically or mentally ill in Iraq. As noted above, estimates of the real
number of US servicemen and women evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003
vary widely.
-
- The British Observer newspaper asserted September 14
that the "true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today
by new figures...which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have
been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including
more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the
war in Iraq have been relatively light."
-
- By the end of November, Roger Roy in the Orlando Sentinel
could place the number of those "killed, wounded, injured or...ill
enough to require evacuation from Iraq" at approximately 10,000. Roy
noted that such figures were hard to track, "leading critics to accuse
the military of underreporting casualty numbers."
-
- Mark Benjamin of United Press International (UPI) has
been one of the more assiduous in pursuing an accurate total of the number
medically evacuated from Iraq. On December 19, Benjamin reported that in
response to a request from UPI the Pentagon had provided a figure of nearly
11,000 US wounded and medical evacuations - 2,273 wounded and 8,581 medical
evacuations.
-
- Benjamin cited the comments of Aseneth Blackwell, former
president of the Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for people
who lose a spouse in war, who said the country had not seen such a total
since Vietnam. "It is staggering," she added.
-
- Benjamin pointed out that the Pentagon's official casualty
update as of December 17 reported only 364 soldiers as "non-hostile
wounded."
-
- The largest estimate of the number of medical evacuations
from Iraq is to be found in a December 30 article by retired US Army Col.
David Hackworth, "Saddam's in the slammer, so why are we on orange?"
-
- Hackworth writes, "Even I...was staggered when a
Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since
George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000
casualties in Iraq - about the number of warriors in a line tank division."
The former colonel adds that the figure "means we've lost the equivalent
of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number"
of available personnel - 135,000 - "has been evacuated back to the
USA!"
-
- Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military's Transportation
Command told Hackworth that as of Christmas his "outfit had evacuated
3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries," a
total 21,972 servicemen and women. Ross, however, cautioned that his figure
might include some of the same service members counted more than once.
-
- The major categories of "non-battle" evacuations
included orthopedic surgery, 3,907; general surgery, 1,995; internal medicine,
1,291; psychiatric, 1,167; neurology, 1,002; gynecological (mostly pregnancy-related),
491.
-
- Hackworth concludes that "it's safe to say that,
so far, somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines have been medically evacuated" from the war zone in Iraq.
-
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- "Treated like dogs"
-
- Once back in the US, the injured are stored in dozens
of military medical facilities around the country, their existence virtually
ignored by the administration, their plight largely unreported by the media.
-
- Until a public outcry improved matters, many wounded
veterans, UPI reported in October, had to wait "weeks and months for
proper medical help" at military facilities such as Fort Stewart in
Georgia and were "being treated like dogs," according to one
officer. The indifference of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the fate of US
servicemen and women is a part of their general contempt for the broad
layers of the working population, Iraqi and American.
-
- The deliberate obscuring of the human toll of the war
and occupation in Iraq is an indication of considerable nervousness within
the Bush administration. Despite the official claims of overwhelming popular
support, the political and media establishment knows full well that opposition
to this war is growing, and that an accurate picture of the war's devastating
consequences would further turn the tide of public opinion.
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