Amputations in Iraq
Most recent word about Walter Reed Hospital’s former trauma nurses is a mixed bag. The good news is that at least some of them have been sent home from Iraq, physically intact. The stress of their work there has taken such a toll that even the Pentagon has seen the light re not keeping nurses working at peak pace for too many months at a time and has placed limits on the calendar time they’re forced to serve in a single stint in Iraq. The other way of operating, namely forcing lengthier stays in some of the worst conditions for medical work, was resulting in too many breakdowns and too few individuals re-upping when the time came that they could get out.
That’s the bad news. One relative of a nurse who just got back from Baghdad recounts that she won’t talk much about her experiences there to most of her family members, particularly not the younger ones. Even the nurse’s limited accounts of what occurred, however, suffice to hint that the reporting Americans are getting via their government and major media outlets is, shall we say, less than full and forthcoming. The crop of incoming patients kept coming around the clock, seven days a week, without let-up. To their credit, they also work sometimes on injured Iraqis.
They averaged at least four to five amputations a night, and still always heard the planes overhead, bringing in new patients. The worst of the work was just to get patients stabilized sufficiently so that they could be crated over to Germany or the U.S., with inevitably mixed results.
Every sign indicates that, while the official tally of deaths mounts steadily though gradually week by week, the official tally of injuries is less than the actual rate of injuries.
Where is our Congress? Do we have NO civilian oversight of the military any more, after 30 years worth of pandering to the military by bogus media warriors like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Kristol and the rest?
When is our Congress going to remember that it has the constitutional power to find out things even in wartime, including the numbers of the wounded in this war the White House wanted so much that it was willing to lie to achieve it? Where are the congressional hearings inviting medical whistleblowers to come in and testify?
