Low for whom? Low by what standard?
***** The New York Times February 15, 2004 The Permanent Scars of Iraq By SARA CORBETT
. . . It's been nearly six months since [Robert] Shrode and [Brent] Bricklin [a 22-year-old Army specialist in the 101st Airborne Division] arrived home from Iraq. Shrode lost most of his right arm, which was amputated just below the elbow in a Baghdad field hospital. Even healed, his face is pitted with purple shrapnel scars the size of raindrops. Bricklin, a broad-shouldered former competitive swimmer who came home honeycombed with shrapnel, bears larger, raw-looking scars from his thigh to his neck. Both men have significant hearing loss, cocking their heads like a couple of old-timers in order to grasp what's said. They are plagued by headaches and are convinced they've had some memory loss. Between them, they've had nine operations since getting, as they like to say, ''blown up'' in Iraq. Shrode, who is shorter and stockier than Bricklin and speaks with a soft Alabama accent, still visits the base hospital five days a week for occupational therapy. Once a month, he sees a military therapist. He has tried, without luck, to persuade Bricklin to get individual counseling too. . . .
. . .[F]or whatever societal void the dead disappear into, it is the wounded who must live with the confounding mix of anonymity and exposure wrought by surviving a war. On and off the Army base, Shrode is approached by strangers who size up his military haircut and missing arm and feel compelled to heap on the thanks for serving in Iraq. They all but ignore Bricklin, who is often with him but whose injuries remain hidden. Shrode finds the situation reliably awkward, sensing a whiff of pity riding on the backside of flattery. The people who open doors for him, he says, make him feel handicapped. And then there are those whose gazes follow him wordlessly as he makes his way down the buffet line at the China King restaurant near the base -- drawn, it would seem, to the spectacle of a one-armed man working to load his plate.
The discomfort feels irresolvable. ''Somebody stares at it, I get mad at them,'' Shrode says. ''Somebody looks away, and I get mad at that.'' . . .
For every broken body in this room [Fort Campbell's mental-health building, where a support-group meeting for injured soldiers meets], there are hundreds more confined to hospital beds across the country and hundreds more again who, by choice or by circumstance, are gutting out the effects of their injuries without the help of peers or mental-health counselors. It has been suggested that the wounded are the hidden casualties of the Iraq war, stranded somewhere between our grief for the dead and a wartime patriotism best stirred by the belief that our troops are both productive and healthy. Thanks to the lifesaving properties of body armor and largely impenetrable Kevlar helmets, combined with highly advanced battlefield medicine, more soldiers are surviving explosions and gunfire than in previous wars. The downside of this is that the injury rate in Iraq is high: an average of nine soldiers have been injured per day. The pace shows little sign of slowing, which means it's possible we will bring home another 1,500 wounded before the start of summer. Some military experts worry that in the next four months -- as the U.S. rotates roughly 110,000 new troops into Iraq, many of them reservists and National Guardsmen with less combat training than the full-time soldiers they are replacing -- injury rates could climb even higher.
The government's reports on the wounded can be confusing. In early February, the Department of Defense Web site listed 2,600 soldiers as wounded in action in Iraq and another 403 as injured in ''nonhostile'' incidents like helicopter or motor-vehicle accidents. Meanwhile, the Army Surgeon General's office said that only 804 soldiers have been evacuated with battle wounds and that over 2,800 have been injured accidentally. In addition, the Surgeon General's office reported that another 5,184 soldiers have been evacuated from the theater for other medical reasons, which could include anything from kidney stones to nervous breakdowns. To date, 569 of these have qualified as psychiatric casualties.
Although many of the soldiers who attend the support group at Fort Campbell have escaped enemy fire, their injuries reflect the full spectrum of what can go wrong during war: Sgt. Jenni McKinley had her right hand crushed when her Humvee blew a tire and flipped over on a sandy road outside of Baghdad. Chief Warrant Officers Emanuel Pierre and Stuart Contant were pilots whose Apache helicopter reportedly malfunctioned and then crashed in Afghanistan, requiring them to spend months in the hospital and to endure multiple operations. There is a medic who is physically uninjured but tormented to the point of agony by memories of treating his wounded and dying colleagues. And then there is a quiet young private who comes because her hair is falling out and her fingers are numb and nobody seems able to tell her why. . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/magazine/15VETS.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>