Wounded Soldiers have fallen off the radar...Lest we forget...!GRAPHIC!

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/wounded/gallery.htm

The war doesn't just affect our troops.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17316437/site/newsweek

It's not just men.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/27/22541/4655

It's not a new thing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101302166_pf.html

We haven't treated them fairly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9524109/

They have been put at risk to save a buck

http://www.mcleague.com/mdp/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=32

Those in charge have betrayed them

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17315490/site/newsweek/

They are abandoned when they come home.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701172.html

They continue to be betrayed by our government.

It's time to support our troops in a real way.Impeach and indict.

[Monkeyman]

1. Same Mission take care of our Wounded K&R

One way to do that is "Bring Them Home Now"

[BOSSHOG]

2. I would suggest that the plight of our wounded

Servicemembers was never on the radar of any "conservative" entity. "Support the Troops" is just a cute little slogan designed to make the ignorant trash lemmings feel good about themselves.

[Monkeyman]

5. That said it for me

[w8liftinglady]

6. I agree-and forgive the graphic nature of my post,but it's time for people to wake up.

[BOSSHOG]

7. No need to apologize My Dear

What I find truly offensive are jerkoff ignorant trash chickenhawks belittling the deaths of our kids saying more die in car wrecks and spending their whole lives not taking responsibility for anything. Those who oppose stem cell research should be locked up in the alzheimer's ward of a nursing home for six months. Those who get their "facts" from limbaugh and hannity and wave their flags and think war is so cool yet have never served should be emptying bed pans at Walter Reed until the "war" is over.

[w8liftinglady]

8. you are SO right...great post

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. One little correction

shoould be emptying bed pans at the local VA until the last warrior wounded in this madness passes on from old age

[w8liftinglady]

23. absolutely.Thank you.

[w8liftinglady]

3. It's time to show the true cost of war-very graphic,but necessary

Are these ugly?Do they offend you?Imagine yourself,your best friend,your husband or your son enduring this...all in the name of money.Get enraged people and then DO SOMETHING.




Mangled leg from blast


Typical fragment wounds of the leg


A common type of injury associated with roadside improvised explosive device run over by a Humvee.



Typical pattern of injury among soldiers wearing Kevlar vests to protect the chest and abdomen.


Blast injury from exploding ordnance.


Radiograph of distal femur mangled by large fragment.


Damage-control laparotomy with temporary abdominal closure — serially closed at WRAMC to prevent long-term ventral hernia and need for skin grafting.


Transpelvic gunshot wound requiring pelvic packing, diverting colostomy, and temporary abdominal closure.

[Monkeyman]

9. May God Forgive Bush I never will

[w8liftinglady]

10. Neither will I-I have devoted my life to making things right for these guys.

[Monkeyman]

4. This Cost is to High Based On Lies by Bush

[lpbk2713]

11. It's been almost fours years since AWOL Monkey Boy told us *Mission Accomplished*

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/28/mission.accomplished/






It turned out to be just another lie in a
long string of lies that continues to this day.

[Monkeyman]

12. And now DOD is covering up the amounts of the wounded

[w8liftinglady]

13. and the media is refusing to show the wounded..and how it has affected their families

[w8liftinglady]

16. I become repulsed every time I hear him make that speech

[w8liftinglady]

14. If you are listening to Randi Rhodes today-these are the images she is speaking of

[w8liftinglady]

15. the articles with the first set of pictures outline the history of the abuse of our GIs

[ourbluenation]

17. bless you for posting this...someone else said to me today they are afraid that

americans are disconnecting to realities like the ones found in your pics.

[w8liftinglady]

18. My intent was not to sensationalize this...these are the injuries our troops are seeing

and why they need help when they get back...both physical and mental.

[OnceUponTimeOnTheNet]

19. It is a fine line to avoid sensationalizing a topic

I think you've done just fine here. It is a reality we all need to bear witness to.

Our Soldiers bear the burden of cost the most.

[w8liftinglady]

20. ...and it pisses me off..even today...that we fail to acknowledge the suffering they have endured

and the suffering their families have endured.They deserve better.

[OnceUponTimeOnTheNet]

26. We do not control the MSM. That would be the WH.

The pain of today will not be seen under the WH rules of today. That is a fact. Whether we like it or not.

Online ~ Reality is a different story, the real story. ~Hence your thread today.

~GB you and your boy and his troop.

[w8liftinglady]

27. You are correct...and thank you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Yep ameircans are disconected at a very deep level

go shoping

[frazzledmom]

24. Watch Idol... and clean the dirt of your little ribbon

I'm going to send these to the guy who told me the only reason he wasn't in Iraq was because of his "trick knee" he got in High School Football.

[w8liftinglady]

25. no kidding.I remember the multiple times my son was in Iraq

watching the evening news every night.Hearing the reports of the dead...but never the injured.Several DUers have sons who have been maimed by this war.These images are hard to look at.I still have trouble connecting with my son.I can only imagine the hell he saw over there.

[Monkeyman]

29. They have all seen why to much

The Dreams will be there forever like mine. You never forget and don't talk is you have seen what I have and these kids

[w8liftinglady]

30. I know,Monkeyman..and I want to help them heal.

[Monkeyman]

31. We need moe vet to vet clinics now

[w8liftinglady]

28. Laura Bush-these guys were all involved in"just one bombing"

may you burn in Hell.

[w8liftinglady]

32. news story from THREE YEARS AGO-still applies today

http://www.channel4.com/news/2004/02/week_2/10_iraq2.html
"People don't want bad news stories coming out from this war and at every level where I need information, every time I need information from the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans' Affairs, about the injuries of this war, I run unto obstacles. None of this is national security. None of this will cause the collapse of the coalition. It's just information that we need to understand what's happening."

[w8liftinglady]

33. from 2003...why no more reporting?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031110-536257,00.html

[w8liftinglady]

34. telling article from the New England Journal of Medicine-from 2004

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/24/2471
-snip-
One key constraint for planners has been the limited number of medical personnel available in a voluntary force to support the 130,000 to 150,000 troops fighting in Iraq. The Army is estimated to have only 120 general surgeons on active duty and a similar number in the reserves. It has therefore sought to keep no more than 30 to 50 general surgeons and 10 to 15 orthopedic surgeons in Iraq. Most have served in Forward Surgical Teams (FSTs) — small teams, consisting of just 20 people: 3 general surgeons, 1 orthopedic surgeon, 2 nurse anesthetists, 3 nurses, plus medics and other support personnel. In Vietnam, only 2.6 percent of the wounded soldiers who arrived at a surgical field hospital died, which meant that, despite helicopter evacuation, most deaths occurred before the injured made it to surgical care.4 The recent emphasis on leaner, faster-moving military units added to the imperative to push surgical teams farther forward, closer to battle. So they, too, were made leaner and more mobile — and that is their fundamental departure from previous wars.

[w8liftinglady]

35. from 2003-and they couldn't foresee the carnage?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D05E5DC1038F935A25752C1A9659C8B63

[w8liftinglady]

36. A telling interview from Newshour -2005

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june05/wounded_2-15.html

-snip

DR. GENE BOLLES: The average American has not really witnessed the horrifying aspects of war, except from a distance, except from reading, except from what they may see on television. And we aren't showing very much here.

TOM BEARDEN: Bolles is currently a neurosurgeon at Denver's public hospital. But for two years he was the lead neurosurgeon at Landstuhl, overseeing the care of thousands of soldiers. He has 30 years of surgical experience and was a flight surgeon in Vietnam. He's also tended to war victims in Kosovo. He says that what he saw at Landstuhl was far worse than anything he witnessed before.

DR. GENE BOLLES: What I saw there was -- constantly in our intensive care units were these very badly injured young men and women with often only one extremity, severe burns, blinded -- just severely, severely injured people.

I've had soldiers breaking down in tears, having to -- becoming very emotional as they would tell me some of the things they were seeing and what bothered them. I've heard so much of that come from the soldiers it's taken a while for me to have a good night's sleep. And I still am restless at times just because of all these stories that I've heard and just some of the things I've seen.

[w8liftinglady]

37. another article-2003..is it any wonder these guys have PTSD?

http://www.alternet.org/story/16767/

"There have been no feature news stories on television focusing on the wounded," Liz Swasey, director of communications at the Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media watchdog group, told me in a telephone interview. "While there have been numerous reports of soldiers getting wounded, there have been no interviews from hospital bed sides," she pointed out. The Alexandria, Va.-based MRC, founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bezel III, monitors all major nationally televised and print news broadcasts and maintains "the nation's largest video news archive," Swasey said.

"The war was televised and sold as a sanitized war with minimal US casualties," said John Stauber, co-author of the recently released book, "The Weapons of Mass Deception," in an email exchange. "Showing wounded soldiers and interviewing their families could be disastrous PR for Bush's war. I suspect the administration is doing all it can to prevent such stories unless they are stage-managed feel-good events like Saving Private Lynch."

[w8liftinglady]

38. this article from 2006 details the complexity of their care

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/national/22wounded.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=8bf4952597307932&ex=1295586000&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds

[w8liftinglady]

39. from 2004-20,000 wounded

http://www.tatteredcoat.com/archives/2004/11/27/over-twenty-thousand-us-soldiers-wounded-in-iraq/

In this piece, which aired in September, Daniel Zwerdling of NPR reports on the exact definition of “wounded in action.” Lt. Col. Donald Cole has been keeping track of the number of soldiers medivac-ed out of Iraq. That number was 20,245 on SEPTEMBER 30! We can only guess what it is now.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4055356

[w8liftinglady]

40. per Ron Kovic-2006

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/forgotten_wounded_20060117/

As I now contemplate another January 20th I cannot help but think of the young men and women who have been wounded in the war in Iraq. They have been coming home now for almost three years, flooding Walter Reed, Bethesda, Brooke Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals all across the country. Paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain-damaged and psychologically stressed, over 16,000 of them, a whole new generation of severely maimed is returning from Iraq, young men and women who were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx veterans hospital in 1968.

I, like most other Americans, have occasionally seen them on TV or at the local veterans hospital, but for the most part they remain hidden, like the flag-draped caskets of our dead, returned to Dover Air Force Base in the darkness of night as this administration continues to pursue a policy of censorship, tightly controlling the images coming out of that war and rarely ever allowing the human cost of its policy to be seen.

[w8liftinglady]

41. Wounded, Weary And Disappeared

http://www.arabworldbooks.com/arab/berkowitz.htm

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."

[w8liftinglady]

42. from 2004-Iraq: The Uncounted

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/19/60minutes/main656756.shtml
"The Pentagon, I think, is afraid that they're going to lose public support for this war, the way they lost public support for Vietnam back in the 1960s," says Pike. "And minimizing the apparent cost of the war, I think, is one way that they're hoping to sustain public support here at home."