"War is hell" (Leiter)
Some pretty shocking statistics here; an excerpt:
Out of 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf War, 118,000 are suffering from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, anxiety, memory loss, and balance problems, and 40% receive disability pay. Gulf vets are also twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects....
Modern battlefields are toxic nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition, exotic explosives, and deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental vaccines that can have dangerous side effects from additives like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures....
According to Fischer and Reiss, "A returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits. An appeal can take up to three years...."
When Gulf War vets complained about the symptoms which have come to be called "Gulf War Syndrome," the Pentagon told them it was in their heads, in spite of studies by the British Medical Journal and the U.S. Center for Disease Control that showed the returnees were suffering illnesses at 12 times the rate of non-Gulf vets.
For five years after the Gulf War the Pentagon denied that any troops had been exposed to chemical weapons. It took pressure from veterans' organizations and Sen. Donald Riegle (D-MI) to get the Pentagon to admit finally that as many as 130,000 troops (the vets say the number is higher) were exposed to chemical weapons from the destruction of the Iraqi arms depot at Khamisiyah.
Veteran organizations are currently fighting the Pentagon over its refusal to screen returning soldiers for mild brain injuries. Figures indicate that up to 10% of the troops suffer from concussions during their tours, a figure that rises to 20% for those in the front lines. Research shows that concussions can cause memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances, and behavior problems. The Pentagon, arguing that the long-term effect of brain injuries needs more research, is unwilling to fund a screening program.
Given the wide use of roadside bombs, "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism," George Zitnay, co-founder of the Brain Injury Center, toldUSA Today. And according to researchers at Harvard and Colombia, the cost of treating those brain injuries will be $14 billion over the next 20 years....
Upwards of 20,000 Americans have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that medicine has invented a new term to describe them - polytrauma. An estimated 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries, and have required amputations. For the blind, brain damaged, and paralyzed, war is indeed hell....
But the hell we bring home is only a pale reflection of the hell we leave behind.
According to a recent estimate by the British medical journal, The Lancet, upwards of 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. Most of the country's infrastructure - already damaged in the first Gulf War or degraded by a decade of sanctions - has essentially collapsed.
Iraq's experience is not unique.
The Vietnam War ended more than 30 years ago, but according to the recent book, Vietnam: A Natural History, Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians are still dying from it.
From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped over 14 million tons of bombs on those three countries, including 90 million cluster munitions on tiny Laos alone. Somewhere between 30 to 40% of those fiendish devices never exploded, and, according to the British Mines Advisory Group, they have killed or maimed 12,000 Laotians since the end of the war. They continue to extract a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people, many of them children.
Traces of the 20 million gallons of Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange herbicides that the United States sprayed over Vietnam still poison the water, soil, vegetation, animals, and people of Southeast Asia, producing cancer and birth defect rates among the highest in the world.
So war is indeed hell - for those who fight it, those caught in the middle of it, and those who eventually pick up the pieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment