Beyond Bodycounts

How many US soldiers in Iraq have been injured and evacuated from the war zone? Thousands.

The largest estimate of the number of medical evacuations from Iraq is to be found in a December 30 article by retired US Army Col. David Hackworth, "Saddam's in the slammer, so why are we on orange?"

Hackworth writes, "Even I...was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq-about the number of warriors in a line tank division." The former colonel adds that the figure "means we've lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number" of available personnel-135,000-"has been evacuated back to the USA!"

After the article discusses Pentagon stonewalling of the facts on just how many injuries we've had in Iraq and what defines a combat injury comes this paragraph:

Until a public outcry improved matters, many wounded veterans, UPI reported in October, had to wait "weeks and months for proper medical help" at military facilities such as Fort Stewart in Georgia and were "being treated like dogs," according to one officer. The indifference of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the fate of US servicemen and women is a part of their general contempt for the broad layers of the working population, Iraqi and American.

Well, that's just peachy. Sounds like something else Evil Tim should have asked flying monkey boy about.