The Casualty (Heckuva New Yorker story on injured GI's - read what * did)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040308fa_fact1

When people talk about the Army being good for a certain kind of young man, it’s boys like Michael Cain they have in mind.

<snip>

August 10th was a Sunday. At 9:40 a.m., Duff took the wheel of the hemmit and Cain the shotgun seat. A Humvee mounted with an M249 led the hemmit out of the palace compound, and another fell in behind. The vehicles lumbered up the short gravel road to Highway One. A hemmit’s cab extends several feet ahead of the front tires, and Cain recalls it swinging out over the blacktop of the highway as the truck made its turn. It is his last memory of Iraq.

<snip>

Cain’s right leg was a mangled slab of splintered bone and stringy red muscles; Blohm knew it couldn’t be saved. Both knees were visibly dislocated. The left thigh was twisted at a bad angle, indicating a broken femur, and the leg appeared both seared and flayed. Cain was shrieking in agony and panic. Brown, the senior medic on the scene, climbed up into the cab with him.

<snip>

Cain was lying in a coma at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in western Germany, where all Iraq-war casualties are taken. Doctors had amputated his right leg below the knee. The condition of the left leg was uncertain. Cain also had a smashed jaw, a broken thumb, a broken arm, and a wound on the back of his head. He’d lost a lot of blood. During the Second World War, families were lucky to get a telegram days or weeks after a son or a husband was hurt. In this war, the Army kept the Cains informed hour by hour; a major at Fort Hood called them five times in two days. Charlene was even able to speak by telephone with the doctor who was treating her son; she learned that they were about to try turning off life support, leaving it in place in case Cain didn’t respond. When she called a second time, a nurse told her they’d switched it off and he’d started breathing on his own. The Fort Hood major was working on getting the Cains plane tickets to Germany when they learned that their son was being flown to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C.

Cain remembers none of this; other soldiers say that the trip from Landstuhl to Walter Reed is grim. Litters are loaded into the fuselage of an Air Force transport, which is made of aluminum and tends to be chilly. The roar of the engines barely masks the moaning and crying of the wounded. When a soldier dies en route, his body is simply covered with a sheet.

<snip>

Celebrities passed through, too—Cain met the actor Gary Sinise, who played a Vietnam War amputee in “Forrest Gump,” and the country singer Shania Twain. One day, President Bush sat on the edge of his bed and asked him if he wanted anything. Cain told the President that his men needed water. When Cain spoke to them by phone two days later, they told him that they suddenly had more water than they could possibly use.

[seventhson]

1. thanks for this. we should NEVER forget what Kerry voted for

[gorrister]

2. sadly...

most Americans, especially repukes, do not care about people like Michael Cain ... they're more interested in how much The Passion raked in.

[OneBlueSky]

3. something tells me this figure is w-a-a-a-a-y low . . .

"As of January 9th, sixty-six service people—almost all of them Army soldiers—had suffered amputation of a hand, a foot, an arm, or a leg. Of those, ten had lost more than one limb.