America's Hidden Battlefield Toll

Guardian/Observer ^ | 9-14-03 | Jason Burke and Paul Harris

[PatrioticCowboy]

The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, 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. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.

The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.

Three US soldiers were killed last week, bringing the number of combat dead since hostilities in Iraq were declared officially over on 1 May to 68. A similar number have died in accidents. It is military police policy to announce that a soldier has been wounded only if they were involved in an incident that involved a death.

Critics of the policy say it hides the true extent of the casualties. The new figures reveal that 1,178 American soldiers have been wounded in combat operations since the war began on 20 March.

It is believed many of the American casualties evacuated from Iraq are seriously injured. Modern body armour, worn by almost all American troops, means wounds that would normally kill a man are avoided. However vulnerable arms and legs are affected badly. This has boosted the proportion of maimed among the injured.

There are also concerns that many men serving in Iraq will suffer psychological trauma. Experts at the National Army Museum in London said studies of soldiers in the First and Second World Wars showed that it was prolonged exposure to combat environments that was most damaging. Some American units, such as the Fourth Infantry Division, have been involved in frontline operations for more than six months.

Andrew Robertshaw, an expert at the museum, said wars also claimed casualties after they were over.

'Soldiers were dying from injuries sustained during World War I well into the 1920s,' he said.

British soldiers are rotated more frequently than their American counterparts. The Ministry of Defence has recently consulted the National Army Museum about psychological disorders suffered by combatants in previous wars in a bid to avoid problems.

The wounded return to the USA with little publicity.

Giant C-17 transport jets on medical evacuation missions land at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, every night.

Battlefield casualties are first treated at Army field hospitals in Iraq then sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, where they are stabilised.

Andrews is the first stop back home. As the planes taxi to a halt, gangplanks are lowered and the wounded are carried or walk out. A fleet of ambulances and buses meet the C-17s most nights to take off the most seriously wounded. Those requiring urgent operations and amputations are ferried to America's two best military hospitals, the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, near Washington, and the National Naval Medical Centre, Bethesda.

The hospitals are busy. Sometimes all 40 of Walter Reed's intensive care beds are full.

Dealing with the aftermath of amputations and blast injuries is common. Mines, home-made bombs and rocket-propelled grenades are the weapons of choice of the Iraqi resistance fighters. They cause the sort of wounds that will cost a soldier a limb.

The less badly wounded stay overnight at the air base, where an indoor tennis club and a community centre have been turned into a medical staging facility. Many have little but the ragged uniforms on their backs. A local volunteer group, called America's Heroes of Freedom, has set up on the base to provide them with fresh clothes, food packages and toiletries. 'This is our way of saying, "We have not forgotten you,"' said group founder Susan Brewer.

[PatrioticCowboy]

We all need to contribute to help raise the morale of our fighting men and women

[I got the rope]

The British press must be retarded

No....just cowards.

[PatrioticCowboy]

Are you being sarcastic?

[optimistically_conservative]

Reference: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

Not sure what you want to discuss about those that are injured. They fall into many different categories, including hostile and non-hostile, with varying degrees.

[Prodigal Son]

Bush should have focused on them before Iraq

He did.

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

I know many Vietnam vets who are mained emotionally

I know a couple of hundred Vietnam vets and the two or three who have problems were nut cases when they went over. I have no idea of the percentage but suspect many of those with problems would have had problems no matter what. 98% of those I know, are normal people today.

[Prodigal Son]

I don't know, am I?

[PatrioticCowboy]

Well, the Taliban are sort of re-surging.

Our military needs freed up to chase them into Pakistan

[Prodigal Son]

However, it bothers me that the ones that ARE injured, we pay no attention to.

Hard to pay attention to if nobody's reporting it.

[Prodigal Son]

Our military needs freed up to chase them into Pakistan

Elaborate.

[PatrioticCowboy]

Our military needs to adopt the ROK tactics in Iraq

[At _War_With_Liberals]

The wounded are receiving the finest medical care possible. Let's not forget to acknowledge that.

This article is biased. It is hard to base a discussion on it.

[PatrioticCowboy]

I am all the time reading news stories of Taliban scum attacking, then fleeing into the tribal lands in Pakistan.

They should be denied a safe refuge

[pierrem15]

The thing is, everytime we have troops attacked and wounded, our troops are giving more than they are getting

That's why the number of attacks has dropped by a third to a half (20-25 in July, 10-15 a day now, according to CENTCOM).

With about 150 KIA since the invasion, I wouldn't be suprised at about 1,500 WIA.

CENTCOM is not providing figures because the counts are hard to categorize: if a guy sprains an ankle in a firefight, is he WIA? What about someone else in an accident responding to a fight? How do you count guys who were at aid stations or MASH units and then returned to their units?

God bless and keep our troops. Maybe someday the media will get off their fat, lazy, defeatest a$$es and we'll hear their stories.

[section9]

Here's part of the problem. When the American leadership class needs to show some spine, only one political party, the Republicans, can be counted on to keep their nerve and their wits about them.

It is important for the execution of foreign policy for it to be bipartisan, especially in time of war. Sadly, the route to the nomination in the Democratic Party runs straight through Chamberlain Land, as in....

When one political party has neither the nerve nor the will to hold fast to a valuable policy, it remains for the other to lead until they will follow out of shame if nothing else. In this sense, Bush paralells Churchill. The chattering classes of London in the late Thirties were full of venom towards Winston, who had a tendency to tell the unvarnished truth about the Nazis. I see the same flowering of conventional wisdom here. I see the same reasoning on both the Dean Left and the Rockford Institute Right that has, as its result, a rationalization for inaction in the face of Terror. Mr. Churchill's words in the Commons during the debate about the Munich Agreement are prescient here when describing the field to which the Democratic Party would lead us...

I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week. I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies.

"Thou are weighed in the balance and found wanting."

And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

That's what this is all about. We want the Al Qaeda to come to Iraq to get killed by trained American infantrymen. As I always say, ALWAYS bet on trained platoons of American soldiers, led by young lieutenants with seasoned first sergeants there to hold their hands. People such as this, many who were draftees, won battle after battle against the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Minh Main Force units, real soldiers who were far and away superior to anything the Arab world can offer.

But the Liberals are, in their bottom heart, afraid that Al Qaeda will come to Iraq to try and kill us. Again, understand that Liberalism in this country is undergoing a profound loss of nerve. These people are afraid of Al Qaeda. We believe that this is an opportunity to kill Al Qaeda's best people. That's the difference between liberals and us.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[Prodigal Son]

That's not elaboration. You asserted that before we dealt with Iraq we should have dealt completely with Afghanistan. With which assets and how would you have used them? You couldn't have put the 3rd ID or the 4th into Afghanistan- no land corridor. That means either light forces or lightly armored. This is what I mean by elaborate. What would you have suggested we do to finish the job in Afghanistan?

At any rate, the war in Iraq has lasted over ten years- don't forget, the war didn't stop in the middle of all that time just because the media said it did. It was time to end that state of affairs. That's exactly what we are in the process of doing.

[At _War_With_Liberals]

"Well, the Taliban are sort of re-surging. "


Bro, please bookmark this site:


http://www.mediaresearch.org/archive/cyber/welcome.asp

[optimistically_conservative]

Hard to pay attention to [the injured] if nobody's reporting it.

LOL, I'm sorry but every injury from hostile action is reported. I'm guessing your referring to the daily tallies, or perhaps you are looking for the OMG effect of a raw number?

I was personally put off by the ghoulish reporting by the press reporting the KIA tally, and then when combat fatalities started falling off and the number of total fatalities before 1 May and after 1 May was reached then the numbers being reported changed to all fatalities.

As of 12 Sept. 2003, 10:00 a.m.*
43 days between 20 March 2003 and 1 May 2003		133 days between 1 May 2003 and 11 Sept. 2003
Hostile:	115	Hostile:	71
Non-Hostile:	23	Non-Hostile:	83
Total:	138	Total:	154

In other words ...

After an astonishingly low number of fatalities during a 43 day police crackdown on violent gangs, more police have been killed by criminals, illness, accidents, suicides and other causes in the 133 days since.

Imagine your reaction to reading such tripe in your local paper. So, now we want the numbers for injuries? No thanks, walk down to your local VA hospital, VFW or Amercian Legion and ask.

[section9]

We will not win this war in the hills of Afghanistan.

Rather, the decisive battles will be in Pakistan's Northwestern Frontier. The Musharraf Government hangs by a thread; that is why what we do there has been very secret, at least for the time being. Once we do go in there, it will be against the will of the Pakistani Government, unless we can convince the Pakis that it is in their interest to clean up the Tribal Areas of Al Qaeda.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[At _War_With_Liberals]

If there were individual threats to each Dim politician's family, I wonder if they would still hold their current positions???