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06/09/2005:

"Stockpiling the Wounded from Iraq: Inside Walter Reed Hospital"

by Nicole Colson
The flights almost always land at night--and the wounded are brought off planes in the dark. Kept away from the news cameras, the nightly parade of the injured who arrive at Maryland's Andrews Air Force base from U.S. Army medical facilities in Germany are driven--sometimes in vans or school buses converted into ambulances--to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., the nation's top military hospitals.

These soldiers have gone from the front lines to the back door--brought back to the U.S. under the cover of darkness to keep them hidden from the media and the public.

According to the Pentagon, the soldiers arrive at night because "operational restrictions" at a runway near the military's main hospital in Germany, where the wounded from Iraq are brought first, affect the timing of flights.

But Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told Salon reporter Mark Benjamin that there is a different reason. "They do it so nobody sees [the wounded]," Rieckhoff said. "In their mindset, this is going to demoralize the American people. The overall cost of this war has been...continuously hidden throughout. As the costs get higher, their efforts to conceal those costs also increase."

For the nearly 4,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq who have been brought through the doors of Walter Reed as of March, the personal cost of the war is staggering. Despite the Bush administration's repeated claims of reaching a "turning point" in the occupation of Iraq, the 250 beds at Walter Reed have been filled to capacity since the invasion--and before that, since the early days of the war on Afghanistan in 2001.

In late 2003, press accounts reported that medical staff at Walter Reed staff were working 70- to 80-hour weeks to handle the influx of patients. Overcrowding was so bad, in fact, that a number of the less seriously wounded were sent to stay in hotels near the hospital--transported during the day to Walter Reed for outpatient treatment. The situation is no better today--though it is more hidden than ever because of the media blackout that the Pentagon has tried to throw over Walter Reed.

Among the patients, the number of seriously injured--suffering from burns, amputations, brain damage, infection and combat stress--show anything but a "turning point" in Iraq.

Ironically, the main reasons for the overflow of seriously injured are improvements in body armor and the use of better medical technology on the battlefield. Because of this, many soldiers today are surviving with more severe injuries than in previous wars.

According to Pentagon statistics, approximately 6 percent of the more than 12,000 troops wounded by bombs or bullets in Iraq or Afghanistan have required amputation--three times the rate in Vietnam. About 20 percent have head or neck injuries, and many more have suffered breathing and eating impairments, blindness or severe disfiguration. Dr. Roy Aaron of Brown Medical School in Rhode Island told the Boston Globe in December that the Veterans Affairs system "literally cannot handle the load" of amputees.
Full: counterpunch.org