Free Republic

<p>U.S. soldiers lack best protective gear By Jonathan Turley I recently received a note from one of the few husbands who knows just what his wife wants as a holiday gift. The Army sergeant (who asked to remain anonymous) e-mailed me from Iraq asking my help in finding him a store to buy body armor for his wife. Both the sergeant and his wife are serving in Iraq, and both have seen action. But, like thousands of U.S. soldiers, his wife was not given the vital ceramic plates for her Kevlar Interceptor vest to protect her from bullet wounds. Instead, he said, she had to scavenge to find plates left behind by Iraqi soldiers — plates of inferior quality that do not properly fit her vest.</p>

For many GIs, Iraq appears to be a strictly BYOB war — Bring Your Own Bulletproofs. Suzanne Werfelman is a mother and a teacher who has been shopping for individual body armor. This is not in response to threats from her elementary-class students in Sciota, Pa.; it's a desperate attempt to protect her son in Iraq. Like many other U.S. service members in Iraq, her son was given a Vietnam-era flak jacket that cannot stop the type of weapons used today. It appears that parents across the country are now purchasers of body armor because of the failure of the...

Thursday October 02, 2003 Families chip in for flak jackets 02.10.2003 - By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles United States soldiers in Iraq are so short of up-to-date flak jackets - often the difference between survivable injury and death in combat - that their families back home have begun buying them out of their own pocket. Campaigners for military families opposed to the continuing occupation angrily denounced the lack of adequate protection yesterday, calling it "outrageous" and part of a pattern of general failure to provide adequate supplies to the troops almost five months after the formal end of the...