The Terrible Toll of the Iraq War
An article in The Boston Globe shows the reality of this devastating war: an amputation rate for U.S. troops twice that of past wars.
Amputation rate for US troops twice that of past wars
Doctors cite need for prosthetics as more lives saved
By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff | December 9, 2004
US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care, according to new data giving the clearest picture yet of the severity of battlefield wounds. The data are the grisly flip side of improvements in battlefield medicine that have saved many combatants who would have died in the past: Only 1 in 10 US troops injured in Iraq has died, the lowest rate of any war in US history.
But those who survive have much more grievous wounds. Bulletproof Kevlar vests protect soldiers’ bodies but not their limbs, as insurgent snipers and makeshift bombs tear off arms and legs and rip into faces and necks. More than half of those injured sustain wounds so serious they cannot return to duty, according to Pentagon statistics.
The The Washington Post also shows how the Iraq War takes a much worse toll than the media projects.
Here are some quotes from the article:
Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.
But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The war in Iraq has produced the “largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War,” said Gawande’s report in the New England Journal of Medicine. By contrast, 24 percent of soldiers wounded in the Vietnam War or the Persian Gulf War did not survive.
“It used to be our thinking that the number of deaths reflects the violence of the war,” Gawande said in an interview. “Now, the number of deaths reflects how well surgical teams are doing in saving lives.”
More than 10,300 U.S. service members have been injured in Iraq and more than 1,000 of them killed in action, according to Defense Department statistics cited in the report. “This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict,” Gawande wrote.The article is U.S. Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever Technology and Surgical Care at the Front Lines Credited With Saving Lives By Ceci Connolly) Thursday, December 9, 2004; Page A24).
The article goes on to show that there have been at least 1,000 Americans already killed in combat, but even more startling is the fact that 10,300 have been wounded in the fighting. The difference between this war and those previous is that medical help for the wounded soldier comes quicker with more modern medical technology. Because the death figures are lower than for comparative years during the Viet Nam War, some in the media tend to dismiss the casualty rate. In media reports on the war the rate of wounded Americans is almost never mentioned.
Most of the media downplay the devastation of the war on these American sons and daughters because they are dominated by Israeli partisans who see the Iraq War as strategically important for Israel. The facts are clear that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, did not aid al Qaeda terrorists and was never a threat to the United States. So why did America go to war? Was it for Oil? Obviously the United States is getting no more oil now than before the war, and the war made it far more expensive. No, it was never about oil. In fact, It has been completely against America’s true interests.
The chief proponents for the war were Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, men who have allegiance to Israel over America. In fact, they wrote a report for the Israeli government a few years ago that called for an American war against Iraq to secure Israel’s eastern flank. The Neocon backers of the war don’t give a damn about the thousands of American’s grievously wounded or killed. They aren’t worried about the horrendous cost to the United States. They don’t care if the rising hatred from this war causes more terrorism that results in the death of many Americans both civilian and military. It is a war for Israel, plain and simple, a war that we will pay for in lives and limbs and hundreds of billions of dollars of American money.
Thousands of American military personnel have been maimed, crippled and blinded by this war. The terrible toll will last cause enormous suffering to these men and their families and huge costs to America for decades to come. May God help us to expose and depose the Jewish supremacists who lead our nation to ruin. –David Duke
