Not that anyone here needs a reminder, but I ran across this news story and it really made me remember why we can not be complacent on any day of the week for the rest of the election cycle. I'm cross posting from
CFA.
Rage. Stuff like this just makes me filled with determination to get us a new president. We can no longer afford this kind of ignorance.
Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.
"I'm here for him -- nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."
He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."
Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.
He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.
"It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."
"If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally."
What the hospital's chief psychologist calls "compassion fatigue" is a widespread syndrome among the medical staff.
"There's a great deal of hurt going on in the hospital," says Maj. Stephen Franco.
But Maj. Cathy Martin, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, prefers to deal with her stress by calling on Americans to consider the plight of the war wounded when making a choice in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
"People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change," she says.
As I think of my cousin who just returned from there (who was regularly treating the injured), as I think of another of my cousin's step brother, who just died there, as I think of every family who has someone over there dying for this Administration's poorly planned, badly executed, misguided, manipulative, horrifying war, I remind myself that we can not take this election for granted, not for a second.
Do not get complacent for a single day. Do not waiver. Go make phone calls. Go through your roledex. Leave no stone unturned. We must win this election, or all our families will continue to suffer needlessly while this president stubbornly sticks to a failed policy that has made us far less safe, and has given the terrorists the best recruiting tool they ever could have asked for. And when you think of that magic number, 1000 troops killed, like it has some kind of signifigance, think of these numbers too:
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, almost 16,000 wounded, injured or sick soldiers from the conflict have been evacuated to Landstuhl.
As of Friday, 1,042 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq -- more than 900 of them since May 1, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over -- and 7,400 were wounded in combat, according to the Pentagon. About 3,400 of the wounded returned to duty after 72 hours. Almost all the rest came to Landstuhl, in southwestern Germany, for treatment.
Remember why we are all here. Go out and do your part. EVERY DAY.