The London Times ran a brutal, no-holds-barred piece on medics behind the lines in Iraq: a modern day M.A.S.H. if you will. Would that any of our own "Times" had the guts to run something half as strong.
On July 10 a mortar exploded near by. Many were injured. Major White was called to a trolley and found himself staring down at one of his nurses, Captain Maria Ortiz.
"We’d been talking an hour before," he recalled. "She told me, ‘I’ve just got my wedding dress. I’ve got to lose two sizes. I’m going to the gym to work out’. She was coming back from the gym when the mortar hit."
She died, and her portrait is now stuck on walls all around the hospital.
There's going to be a lot of debate on casualty rates and benchmarks and misspent billions this month. September is supposed to be a month when final decisions about Iraq are made. For many, the final decisions have already been made.
Another young Iraqi boy named Mustafa, 8, had been shot in the head when his family’s car was waved through one end of a check-point just as a US convoy was entering the other. One of the convoy’s gunners opened fire. Mustafa will be brain-damaged for life.
The article notes that the survival rate among American casualties in the Iraq War is 90%. That means for every dead soldier, there's 10 guys like this:
A soldier badly wounded by a roadside bomb . . .all four limbs had either been severed or were attached by little more than skin. He had 70 per cent burns to what was left of his body. . . .All his remaining limbs were amputated except for the top of one arm . . .that life as he knew it is over.
This isn't some grizzled vet who knew what he was getting into.
He is 19.
Nor is he an exception.
"They were devastating injuries," said Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Costello, the officer in charge of the Emergency Treatment Section. "I’ve seen so many of them."
Forget about securing Iraq; Coalition forces can't even secure their own prisons.
. . .a blindfolded, heavily sedated Iraqi detainee from Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. The medics removed the blindfold to find his eyeballs bulging out.
At first they thought his eyelids had been cut off by his fellow prisoners. Then they realised that both eyeballs had been gouged from their sockets and were hanging loose.
His fellow prisoners had also cut off his tongue.
They had beaten him so severely that all four limbs required faschioto-mies – the slitting of the skin – to release the pressure caused by internal swelling. "It was a stunning degree of cruelty," said Major Won Kim, the ophthalmologist who removed the eyeballs
I wonder what would happen if the New York Times were to run a piece like this? No, I take that back; I know exactly what would happen. Some midlevel government flunky would call for a treason indictment against the NYT editorial board, and a very good reporter would loose their job.
For Western publics this is a sanitised war. Iraq is too dangerous for news teams to record properly the daily shootings, bombings and executions.
Hell, it's too dangerous for the Pentagon to record properly the daily shootings, bombings and executions.