I've been distracted today - in part, at least, by this
story which was, until a few minutes ago, featured on the front of the Washington Post's website. Since I saw it, I've seen several diaries on Iraq appear. In fact, the
one by ilona titled," Part 1: Iraq Vets Speak Out" might have been a more appropriate forum for what follows - but since I haven't found this story mentioned yet and it's no longer featured at WaPo, I say, to hell with repetition - I want everyone to read this before Father's Day tomorrow. (So hold your breath and please follow me under the break.)
We gripe a lot here about the MSM in general and about the Washington Post in particular - but they still deliver the occasional kick-in-the-ass article. Just in time for Father's Day, check out
April Witt's portrait of one bereaved Father whose son died in Iraq and the campaign he's waging to fulfill his son's last expressed wish...
Private 1st Class John Hart whispered into the phone so he wouldn't be overheard. It was just a matter of time, he said, before his buddies and he bumped down some back road in Iraq right into an ambush. They were so exposed, the somber young soldier told his dad, back home in Bedford, Mass. They were riding around in unarmored Humvees with canvas tops and gaping openings on the sides where doors should be. That seemed pretty stupid now that people were shooting at them and lobbing rockets. John, a 20-year-old gunner whose job it was to keep his head up and return fire, felt hung out in the breeze.
As John's father, Brian Hart, remembers the conversation, he listened with growing alarm, then stepped into his home office so his wife, Alma, wouldn't hear. It was October 11, 2003.
This was not the first time John had confided that the U.S. military was failing to provide him with essential equipment. In previous calls home, Brian recalls, John recounted a bewildering array of shortages and snafus. Before landing in Iraq that scorching July, John told his father, he'd been issued a winter-weight camouflage suit, body armor with protective plates too small to shield his broad chest, and a broken rifle. An expert marksman and former co-captain of the Bedford High School shooting team, John had been told to conserve scarce bullets by not taking practice shots to sight his weapon, he said. Summertime water rations were so inadequate that guys were passing out in the Iraqi heat. ...
During this call home, however, John seemed unusually concerned. He asked his dad to do something to get his buddies the equipment they needed to try to survive. "He said anything I could do would be greatly appreciated," Brian recalled.
If you've checked out the link, you know now that John died seven days later - shot through the neck because his Humvee had no armor. His father's attempt to obtain adequate gear - even though it would be too late for John - is saddening and maddening. His journey led him to the Pentagon but he was most comforted by the reactions of Senators Kennedy and Kerry, despite Republican family members begging him to stay away from those 'liberals.'
John Hart died quickly but his lieutenant didn't, according to Spec. Joshua Sams, one of the few survivors of the attack. The details takes us beyond tragic and saddening to ... well, I'm not sure, but it's certainly beyond absurd.
Sams went back to kneel beside his lieutenant. "My pants legs were instantly covered, drenched in blood," Sams says. The bullet had severed Bernstein's femoral artery. The lieutenant was going to bleed to death if they didn't tie a tourniquet around his leg fast. But they hadn't been issued tourniquets.
Eight months earlier, a committee of military medical experts had urged the Pentagon to give every soldier in the war a tourniquet. Bleeding to death from an arm or leg wound is the most common cause of preventable death in combat, the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care reported. Quick access to a cheap, simple modern tourniquet could save many lives, military doctors had concluded. Yet it would be two more years before the U.S. Central Command... adopted a policy saying all soldiers in combat should carry a tourniquet. Even then, the policy was moot because the Army didn't widely distribute tourniquets for several more months. An investigation by the Baltimore Sun spurred that distribution and documented one reason for the delay: Military procurement specialists were studying what kind of pouch to carry the new first aid kits with tourniquets in.
I don't know about you gentle readers but, as a military mom, I'm sick and tired of reading these stories. It's like reading the script for a Lifetime network movie that never ends. Here's a scenario that promises to keep me awake tonight:
That left Sams, in October 2003, in much the same position as a soldier on a Revolutionary War battlefield: trying to improvise a tourniquet with a length of cloth and a stick. Only Sams couldn't find a stick in the Iraqi field.
"I was looking for anything hard," Sams recalls. He and Williams found a fuel-can nozzle in the Humvee. Sams wrapped a fresh field dressing around Bernstein's leg and used the gas nozzle to try to twist the dressing tightly enough to staunch the arterial bleed. As Sams twisted, the strings on the field dressing broke.
Desperate, Sams cut the strap off an M4 rifle and tried again. The strap didn't break, but it was too short. It kept coming untwisted, Sams says. So he tied a dressing on top of his improvised tourniquet to keep it in place. Bernstein still had a pulse, but he'd stopped moaning, Sams says.
Sams didn't have time to feel relieved when he finally spied his platoon leader and a few other soldiers walking toward their crash site. He checked the lieutenant's neck and could no longer find a pulse, he says. He tried to perform CPR, but with his wounded arm couldn't apply much pressure. He let one of the newly arrived soldiers take over. Sams leaned against the Humvee, exhausted, and watched a sad succession of privates and officers pound Bernstein's chest long past knowing their efforts were futile. Roughly an hour after the attack on the convoy, a Blackhawk helicopter arrived to evacuate Bernstein and Sams, according to interviews and records.
Sams, now a long-haul truck driver, never regained the feeling in his left arm. Bernstein, one of West Point's finest, a genuine hero educated for military brilliance at a cost of more than $400,000 to taxpayers, died without a $20 tourniquet.
There is much more to this story and I commend the author for her narrative style and vivid expression. For example, Sams' wounded arm? Before he could go tend to his wounded lietenant (you'll learn in the article), he'd been trapped under the wrecked Humvee and had to wait for another wounded comrade to help free his arm. He already knew that Hart was dead in the back of the vehicle, and there's another soldier lying frozen in fear next to him - well, if we'd seen something like this coming from either Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg, I'd be reaching for a handkerchief and popping some more popcorn.
But it isn't a freaking Lifetime sob-story-of-the-week - this is reality. And my son is headed there. Though he's career Navy with sixteen years in as a telecommunications expert, he was put on notice a couple of weeks ago that his was a job that can move laterally to other branches of the armed forces. Sixteen years of Navy training - he can coordinate video-feeds from twenty cameras on the flight deck simultaneously - and he's had not one day of combat training. Sixteen years and he's never fired a gun. Sixteen years of ugly bell-bottoms and denim shirts - he just got his new work uniform and it's camoflage fatigues.
On Mother's Day, he looked away from me and stared out the window as we talked about Haditha. He's scared but wasn't too embarrassed to let me see it. I've urged him, begged him, to refuse orders to go to Iraq but he won't talk about it with me. Tonight I'm calling his father - maybe if his Daddy says it's okay, he'll listen. But I doubt it since he's an honorable man. A good son, an excellent father, a talented videographer, he took an oath. And if he fails on the sand in Iraq, he'll be just another number to Bush and Co. but it will be my flesh-and-blood, my baby boy, and my grand-daughter will only know him by the video he's left behind.
If he would refuse to go, what's the worst thing that could happen? He'll go to the 'brig' for a few years, get a less-than-honorable discharge for what crimes? Malfeasance? Dereliction of duty?
As a mother, I ask: When will Rumsfeld be charged with malfeasance and/or dereliction of duty? High crimes, indeed. Letting someone bleed to death for lack of a $20 tourniquet strikes me as treasonous.
Not one more child - American or Iraqi - should die. No more, I say. Can't we stop this hideous story-line from devastating any more mamas and daddies?
Don't talk to me about how we must be cautious in withdrawing from Iraq.
Don't tell me how 'we broke it, now we got to fix it.'
I don't want to hear about 18-month plans.
I don't want my baby to die.
Or yours.
Or anyone's.
Bring them home now.
**************************
UPDATE: On Monday, journalist April Witt "fields questions and comments about one man's struggle to understand why the United States deployed soldiers, including his late son, to Iraq without armor." That's the Post Magazine, Monday, June 19, 2006 Noon ET.
Here's the link - they're taking questions already.