Monday, April 09, 2007

Injured? Get back in there!

If this doesn't piss you off, I don't know what will:
From Salon:
Salon has uncovered further evidence that the military sent soldiers with acute post-traumatic stress disorder, severe back injuries and other serious war wounds back to Iraq.

...
"Military commanders "could care less about the soldier's physical and mental welfare, as long as they can shoot straight," Smart said. "Our military is stretched to its breaking point," he added. "Commanders are being backed into a corner in order to produce units that on paper are ready to deploy. They are casting the moral and ethical implications -- and soldiers -- to the side."
...
"Grigsby, the 3rd Brigade commander, said in an interview last month that the well-being of his soldiers was among his top priorities. He did not deny deploying injured troops, but he asserted that the injured soldiers who were deployed were to be confined to relatively safe jobs. He said those troops would work in a capacity that strictly followed each soldier's "physical profile," a document prepared by doctors spelling out a soldier's physical limitations.

But one injured soldier who was deployed to Iraq in March wrote in an e-mail to Salon that her back condition has worsened significantly. "Now my left leg has started to go numb and they are telling me to double up on my meds, which I can't," she wrote. "They are not putting us in safe jobs at all. I still wear all of my gear and by the end of the day the pain is more than unbearable," she added. "I break my [physical] profile pretty much on a daily basis. At this point I will either go back [home] in a wheel chair or paralyzed or worse.""

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