The Wounded Come Home

Monday, Nov. 10, 2003 By MARK THOMPSON
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This is a story of the unseen war--and the grim, quiet battles that take place when wounded soldiers arrive home. What happened to members of the 2nd Squad of the 1st Platoon--who call themselves the War Machine--of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company is a tale that has never been told. Soldiers have been wounded in war since the beginning of time--a fact that armies never like advertising. The Pentagon, which makes terse announcements when U.S. soldiers die in combat in Iraq, doesn't inform the public about those who have been wounded or release month-by-month injury counts. The wounded are mentioned only when some other soldier has been killed in the same attack. "When you join the Army, they send your picture to your hometown paper because they want everybody to know that you're leaving for the military," says Meinen, a dark-haired practical joker from Grangeville, Idaho. "But if you're wounded, the military doesn't tell them, because they might be worried about the public getting negative about what's going on over there." Says the serious, quiet-spoken Castro, from Santa Ana, Calif.: "Nobody knows what happened to us, even though it was one of the biggest ambushes in Iraq. People are only finding out about soldiers who are dying, but American soldiers are getting injured too."

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October was the bloodiest month yet for the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, and the number of wounded is plainly on the rise. Daily attacks against U.S. troops have tripled. The number of U.S. troops who have died in hostilities in Iraq from May 1, when President Bush declared "major combat operations over," through last week has topped the 114 who died in the invasion and its immediate wake. By week's end 122 U.S. troops had been killed in action in Iraq, for a total of 236. But the number of U.S. wounded since May 1 is 1,242, more than double the 551 injured during the war.

Yet the American soldiers in the current Iraq war have a better chance of surviving those wounds and getting back home than any other soldiers in history. Better protection, faster evacuation and improved medical techniques at the edge of combat have dramatically reduced battlefield mortality. At the same time, although body armor and wound-sealing potions have made it less likely that soldiers will be killed in battle, they have also increased the likelihood of certain kinds of injuries, especially amputation, because a soldier's extremities remain vulnerable to the kind of homemade munitions the Iraqis are routinely deploying. The Iraqis lack the air power and artillery that can easily kill, but the weapons they are using--RPGs, car bombs and improvised explosive devices--have increased the ranks of the wounded. And these wounded seem to be threatening the morale of the soldiers left behind. While the Air Force has flown 1,513 battle casualties from the Iraqi theater, 9,341 have been flown out for other health reasons, including mental stress.