This isn't easy to write and it won't be pleasant to read.
Hey, Jonah Goldberg, you reading this? You want to cart your lazy, pitiful ass to Iraq?
This is what's happening to our brave American servicemen and women in Iraq. This is what's happening to Iraqis.
We should all surely face these ghastly realities, because if we turn away in revulsion, this horrendous war being fought by the children of those less fortunate then us, will never end.
This is reality:
Reality is the Marine begging orthopedic surgeon Paul "Chip" Gleason not to amputate his mutilated hand. "He reached up with his other arm and grabbed me and said, 'Don't take it,' " Gleason recalls.
Reality is the bloodied insurgent shot in the genitals by a U.S. soldier. Bishoff says he found little to repair, but he resisted urgings by angry GIs to amputate.
And reality is Biggers, the soldier with the bullet wound through his head, kept alive by doctors who wouldn't have operated on him back home.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
U.S. military doctors stationed in Iraq are seeing mind-numbing injuries. Some doctors defy their medical training and keep their patients alive long enough so they can be flown back to the United States. Once home, their next-of-kin can see and caress these young heroes one final time.
After a helicopter rushed Army Spc. Ethan Biggers to the military hospital here in March, neurosurgeons left the operating room shaken by the extensive damage to his brain.
. . ."If he came into my hospital in the States, gunshot wound to the head, eyes fixed and dilated, not a chance I would take him into the O.R. Not a chance," says Schlifka, 35, of Philadelphia. "(We'd) tell his family it's a non-survivable injury."
But Schlifka and Bakken, both Army majors, had long before made a pact -- something they would not have done back home. Because counseling a family in a war zone is impossible, and because the U.S. military offers no guidelines on whether to withhold treatment for severely brain-damaged casualties, the doctors had decided to err on the side of life. No matter how severe the brain injury, no matter how hopeless the case, they vowed to keep a soldier alive long enough to get him out of the war zone, if only so his family could see him one last time.
Now Army Spc. Ethan Biggers is being treated at Walter Reed. His family is grateful to the surgeons who kept him alive. He has a just born son he has never met.
"It's not our job to play God," Schlifka explains. "Even if we know that functionally they will not recover, we feel that it is important for their families to have closure."
The pact between Bakken and Schlifka, though well-meaning, has left the Biggers family in an emotional limbo. Within hours of the surgery that kept him alive, Biggers was headed out of Iraq.
Today, he remains comatose at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He reacts to noise and touch, and he opens his eyes occasionally, but they remain unfocused. Members of his family rejoice with every flicker of consciousness. They hope for a miracle.
"They've gone from saying 'let him die with dignity' to 'there is hope that the damage is not nearly as much' as they thought," says father Rand Biggers, 59. "They say these things are incremental."
Using a Montana law that allows for marriage by proxy consent, Rand Biggers arranged in April for his son to wed fiancée Britni Fuller, 20. The couple's son, Eben, was born Friday.
Rand Biggers wants to give Ethan every chance to live and believes the battlefield brain surgeons made the right choice to keep him alive.
"I would thank them with all my heart," he says, "even if this doesn't turn out well."
The poor guy didn't want his hand amputated. Is Mr. Rumsfeld reading this? Or Mr. Bush? Or Mr. Cheney? Or Jonah Goldberg?
Although Gleason overcame his jitters, he still struggles to get past the image of the young Marine pleading for his hand. Gleason says he knew that it could not be saved, and he had to make a choice about what to tell the Marine.
The surgeon told him he would save what he could. But in the end, that promise was empty, Gleason concedes. He amputated the hand.
"Nothing was savable beyond the wrist," he says. "That was probably the hardest time I've had. No one else has asked specifically those questions and made those requests. It's very difficult to face."
In retrospect, Gleason says, the promise and the momentary hope it gave the Marine were good.
An insurgent's genitals:
U.S. soldiers in Ramadi had watched for two weeks as an insurgent set about planting a roadside bomb. When he was finally placing the explosive in the ground, they shot him from a distance and wounded him in the groin, according to a report Bishoff read.
The wounded man managed to reach a car and flee. But he was captured five hours later, still bleeding from the wound, and flown to the hospital here.
Bishoff could have simply amputated the insurgent's genitals, which were mangled by a bullet from an Army sniper.
At an Iraqi hospital, doctors would have had to remove the man's penis, Bishoff says. The U.S. soldiers who caught him planting the bomb had made clear that they preferred amputation, he says.
"My journal records that they said: 'Doc, why did you have to fix it? You could have thrown it all away,' " Bishoff says. "They didn't want me to reconstruct his penis. They didn't want me to reconstruct his testicles. They were hoping that I would just remove all of that."
Bishoff says he understood their anger. "The troops are actually seeing these insurgents in the field, men trying to kill them on a daily basis, and this grows a lot of hatred," he says.
I'm sorry I can't go on, if you want, you can read more in USA Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/...