Gov’t Struggles to Cope With Wounded GIs

More than 800 of them have lost an arm, a leg, fingers or toes. More than 100 are blind. Dozens need tubes and machines to keep them alive. Hundreds are disfigured by burns, and thousands have brain injuries and mangled minds.

These are America’s war wounded, a toll that has received less attention than the 3,500 troops killed in Iraq. Depending on how you count them, they number between 35,000 and 53,000.

More of them are coming home, with injuries of a scope and magnitude the government did not predict and is now struggling to treat.

There’s a tremendous amount of unpredicted happenings in Iraq, and the scope of injuries and how to cope with that huge number of injured GI’s is, in my opinion, the most important one of all, these fine men and women have given themselves to this nation and by their service we are indebted to them for as long as they live…

I am well aware that in war there are casualties, that’s the way it happens and I am not crying about that fact, what I am still upset about is how these particular injuries and deaths didn’t have to happen where they did, for over 4 years we have had a police action forced down our throats and we were told by our CiC that it is the War on Terror and fighting it in Iraq makes America a lot safer because of it…

And that is the biggest crock of crap we have been handed in recent years, right up there with how the entire world was going to fall into communist control if we didn’t pacify South Vietnam…

“If we left Iraq tomorrow, we would have the legacy of all these people for many years to come,” said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and an adviser to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “The military simply wasn’t prepared for its own success” at keeping severely wounded soldiers alive, he said.

Survival rates today are even higher than the record levels set early in the war, thanks to body armor and better care. For every American soldier or Marine killed in Iraq, 15 others have survived illness or injury there.

And that survival rate is a wonderful thing, and a testament to the skill of our Combat Medics, Corpsman, Doctors, Nurses, and all associated medical personnel, we have troops surviving wounds that just a few years ago would have been deadly…

But is the government prepared to provide the continual care that these fine men and women are going to need and deserve?? For as long as they NEED it, with the time frame of that NEED being for the rest of their lives in many cases?? Are they prepared to shoulder the financial cost??

Do you think the loony left is prepared to take that responsibility if they were in full control of the USA??I should certainly hope so, but given the recent finding concerning the quality of care at Walter Reed Army Hospital and the continuing debacle that is known as the Veterans Administration, it does give you reason to wonder…

Our returning troops deserve noting but the very best in medical care, we OWE that to them, they didn’t have to go into the military, they are volunteers, they do their job out of love for country and they go where they are told and do as they are ordered, and it is the responsibility of the government ordering them into that theater of operations to provide them with whatever it takes to return home to a life as close to normal as is humanly possible…

Full Story Here:
Gov’t Struggles to Cope With Wounded GIs

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