[Peace-discuss] wounded

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Maybe 8,000 US Wounded In Bush's Iraq War -
Report US Troops - Wounded, Weary And Disappeared
By Bill Berkowitz 
Tom Paine.com
8-29-03


The nation reached a sad milestone in late August. With the death of an 
American soldier in a roadside bombing on August 29, the number of soldiers 
killed 
in Iraq after the official end of the war reached 139, exceeding the 
"postwar" 
casualty count. Nightline aired a feature; the Associated Press posted a 
story on the war dead -- but most media outlets continue to ignore an equally 
drea
ry reality. 
In a summer dominated by the Bryant sex case, Arnold's debut in California's 
recall election and the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons, no hordes of 
television cameras await the planeloads of wounded soldiers being airlifted 
back to 
the states, unloaded at Andrews Air Force Base, and stuffed into wards at 
Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other facilities. We see few photos of 
them 
undergoing painful and protracted physical rehabilitation, few visuals of 
worried 
families waiting for news of their sons or daughters. The men and women 
injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have become the new disappeared. 
Liz Swasey of the conservative media watchdog Media Research Center (MRC) 
confirms this perception. "There have been no feature news stories on 
television 
focusing on the wounded," she says. "While there have been numerous reports 
of 
soldiers getting wounded, there have been no interviews from hospital 
bedsides." 
The numbers of soldiers wounded in action are hard to come by. Since the 
start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon has put the figure at 827. But 
Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, the man in charge of airlifting the wounded 
into 
Andrews Air Force Base, recently mentioned much higher numbers in an 
interview 
with National Public Radio. 
"Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's 
classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at 
Andrews," he said. "And that number doubles when you count the people that 
come 
here to Andrews, and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and 
Bethesda..." 
Some journalists also dispute the Pentagon's official count. Julian Borger of 
The Guardian claims "unofficial figures are in the thousands." Central 
Command in Qatar talked of 926 wounded, but "that too is understated," Borger 
maintains. And in fact, a mid-August report in The Salt Lake City Tribune 
claims 
that Central Command has acknowledged 1,007 U.S. wounded. (The Pentagon did 
not 
respond to inquiries.) 
Whatever the actual numbers of wounded, military hospitals are being 
overwhelmed. "Staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks," Borger reports. "[T]he 
Walter 
Reed army hospital in Washington is so full that it has taken over beds 
normally reserved for cancer patients to handle the influx, according to a 
report on 
CBS television." Some of the outpatient wounded are even being placed at 
nearby hotels because of the overflow, according to The Washington Times. 
Inside these hospitals, there's no shortage of compelling narratives for the 
interested TV reporter. 
For example, an accident in western Iraq threw Sgt. Robert Garrison of 
Ithaca, N.Y., from his Humvee, according to a June story by the Associated 
Press. He 
landed on his head, fractured his skull and slipped into unconsciousness. 
Garrison "can't speak at more than a faint whisper and breathes with the help 
of 
a tube jutting from his neck. A scar runs across the back of the head, and 
the 
left side of his face droops where he has lost some control over his 
muscles." 
Sgt. Kenneth Dixon, of Cheraw, S.C., was in a Bradley fighting vehicle when 
it plunged into a ravine. He "broke his back, leaving him unable to use his 
legs." These days he's at a veteran's hospital in Richmond, Va., "focusing on 
his 
four hours of daily physical therapy." 
Marine Sgt. Phillip Rugg, 26, recently had his left leg amputated below the 
knee, caused by a grenade "that penetrated his tank-recovery vehicle March 22 
outside Umm Qasr, nearly shearing his foot off." 
The stories of these injured soldiers obviously straddle party lines and 
should sadden Americans from all walks. So what is it about the wounded that 
makes 
us uncomfortable? Why have they been left out of the coverage of the war by 
the broadcast media? 
The consensus seems to be that the wounded are too depressing a topic -- and 
also that they might threaten Bush's popularity. 
"The wounded are much too real; telling their stories would be too much of a 
bummer for television's news programmers," says Norman Solomon, media critic 
and co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You . "Dead 
people don't linger like wounded people do. Dead people's names can be posted 
on a 
television honor role, but the networks and cable news channels won't clog up 
their air time with the names and pictures of hundreds and hundreds of 
wounded 
soldiers." 
Former L.A. Times television critic Howard Rosenberg reflects this sentiment, 
and adds that giving the wounded air time could be perceived as too 
controversial. "Since 9/11, there is a general feeling among many media 
outlets that 
they need to stay away from anything that could be interpreted as disloyal to 
the country," he says. 
John Stauber, author of the recently released book The Weapons of Mass 
Deception , says the war was sold on television as a sanitized war with 
minimal U.S. 
casualties -- which was exactly what the Bush administration tried to 
engineer. "Showing wounded soldiers and interviewing their families could be 
disastrous PR for Bush's war," he says. "I suspect the administration is 
doing all it 
can to prevent such stories unless they are stage managed feel-good events 
like Saving Private [Jessica] Lynch." 
Tod Ensign directs Citizen Soldier, a GI rights advocacy organization. He 
thinks the failure to cover the wounded indicates an implicit loyalty to the 
White House, and a reluctance to address a failed Iraq policy. "The American 
media 
is by and large controlled and dominated by corporations that line up 
politically with the Bush administration," Ensign says. "They appear to be 
increasingly incapable of grappling with such a highly charged issue as the 
wounded." 
President Bush landed on the U.S.S. Lincoln on May 1 and declared an end to 
major combat operations in Iraq. Since that overhyped media event, the 
president has repeatedly visited with troops that have returned intact, and 
he has 
issued statements honoring the dead. 
But the president has not shown up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to 
shake hands with the recovering Robert Garrisons or Kenneth Dixons. 
Journalists 
should pay these visits for him, to tell us the stories of these men and 
women, 
whose problems will stretch into the coming years. And they should ask the 
president why he is so reluctant to see these troops he sent so confidently 
into 
battle. 
<http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8736>
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8736




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