Sooner Be Blue

 

How about holding this White House accountable for the disgraceful treatment of our soldiers? The wounded in military hospitals .. and badly injured troops being dragged back to the war zone.

 

Last Saturday VP Dick Cheney (5 draft deferments, he had more important priorities) got up in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the oceanside Ritz-Carlton hotel and accused the Democrat-led House of not supporting troops in Iraq .. "They're not supporting the troops. They're undermining them."

 

Talk is cheap, and so is a bumper sticker .. everybody knows that the best way to support the troops is with a yellow magnetized ribbon on your car ..

 

My idea of "support the troops" is to NOT send them deliberately into harm’s way .. into the middle of a civil war to die senselessly in search of Bush's idea of "victory" .. which is to hold out long enough to hand the mess to his successor.

 

Hey Dick, what do you have to say about this?

 

From salon.com:
"Army deployed seriously injured troops
Soldiers on crutches and canes were sent to a main desert camp used for Iraq training. Military experts say the Army was pumping up manpower statistics to show a brigade was battle ready."

 

Call back the draft .. that will get us some fresh troops .. and maybe a bit more protest too.

 

It irks me no end that Bush and Cheney continue to paint Democrats (and some Republicans with a conscience) as unwilling to "support the troops" while US military leaders are sending injured soldiers back to Iraq is unconscionable.

 

Putting troops too injured to bear the weight of their body armor into a war zone is like placing them in the numbers column of returning dead.

 

And it looks like we can thank the surge for this gross abuse of our injured soldiers .. the only reason these soldiers are being sent back is to meet the troop surge numbers the White House wanted.

 

Here's the rest of the Salon piece:

 

 

"Last November, Army Spc. Edgar Hernandez, a communications specialist with a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, had surgery on an ankle he had injured during physical training. After the surgery, doctors put his leg in a cast, and he was supposed to start physical therapy when that cast came off six weeks later.

 

But two days after his cast was removed, Army commanders decided it was more important to send him to a training site in a remote desert rather than let him stay at Fort Benning, Ga., to rehabilitate. In January, Hernandez was shipped to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., where his unit, the 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, was conducting a month of training in anticipation of leaving for Iraq in March.

 

Hernandez says he was in no shape to train for war so soon after his injury. "I could not walk," he told Salon in an interview. He said he was amazed when he learned he was being sent to California. "Did they not realize that I'm hurt and I needed this physical therapy?" he remembered thinking. "I was told by my doctor and my physical therapist that this was crazy."

 

...when he got to California, he was led to a large tent where he would be housed. He was shocked by what he saw inside: There were dozens of other hurt soldiers. Some were on crutches, and others had arms in slings. Some had debilitating back injuries. And nearby was another tent, housing female soldiers with health issues ranging from injuries to pregnancy.

 

Hernandez is one of a dozen soldiers who stayed for weeks in those tents who were interviewed for this report, some of whose medical records were also reviewed by Salon. All of the soldiers said they had no business being sent to Fort Irwin given their physical condition. In some cases, soldiers were sent there even though their injuries were so severe that doctors had previously recommended they should be considered for medical retirement from the Army.

 

...John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent organization that studies military and security issues.....says he suspects the injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that on paper, at least, "the unit would have a sufficient head count to be mission-capable."

 

...But injured soldiers from the brigade were not just shuttled to California; some were sent on to Iraq. Earlier this month Salon reported that on Feb. 15, shortly after returning from Fort Irwin to Fort Benning, 75 injured soldiers from the 3rd Brigade lined up for screenings at the troop medical clinic. Some of the soldiers there that day described cursory meetings with a division surgeon -- meetings designed to downgrade their health problems, the soldiers said, so that they could be deployed to the war zone. Records for some of those soldiers show doctors had previously concluded that those soldiers could not wear body armor because of serious skeletal and other injuries.

 

...Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins was one of those soldiers at NTC with a hurt back, even though late last year, doctors recommended he be considered for medical retirement. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where doctors fused three of his vertebrae during surgery. He takes morphine for the pain in his neck and back.

 

...Jenkins said the disregard for soldiers' health motivated him to speak out, despite his fears that as an active-duty soldier he could suffer reprisal from superiors. "I am a guy who has been in the Army for 21 years," he said. "For me to speak about this -- and risk everything -- then there has got to be a problem. There has got to be an issue here." [..]

 

"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." Harry S. Truman