Consider the number 72,000. This number — of total U.S. battlefield casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, through Jan. 5, 2008 — is simple enough, but as I ponder the fact that Paul Sullivan and his organization, Veterans for Common Sense, had to wrest it from the Department of Defense with a Freedom of Information Act request, and the fact that the only media outlet to pick up on it so far is the Scottish newspaper The Herald, I begin to grasp the extent of the deception in place sustaining the war on terror.
The reason that the casualty totals reported are far lower, Sullivan explained to me, is that the Defense Department releases the stats on only one category of battlefield casualty to the media, the number of GIs “wounded” in action, that is, harmed by the instrumentation of war: bullet, shrapnel or knife.
A GI who cracks his head on the windshield of his Humvee in a crash, though he may have suffered brain damage and had to be evacuated from the battlefield, is considered “injured,” not “wounded,” Sullivan explained, and thus doesn’t show up in the figure the DoD releases and the media misleadingly report. Likewise, a GI who suffers a heart attack, or, let’s say, one of those desert mystery illnesses, or a severe emotional collapse, is “ill,” not “wounded,” and is also MIA from the official casualty count. And in this way does the war remain a tad more statistically palatable to a distracted public.
It is at this level of deception that things get horrific: in the denial of care for physically and, especially, emotionally wounded vets — men and women suffering from the private hell of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“VA hospitals and clinics have already treated 263,909 unplanned patients from the
Note well the words “unplanned” and “unanticipated.” This facet of the Bush administration’s lack of planning for its invasions has so far escaped significant notice. Apparently the neocon brain trust expected such a cakewalk that the costs and logistics of GI medical care weren’t taken into account. Sullivan said he fully expects the VA to face as many as 700,000 patient claims — including staggering numbers of PTSD claims as our battle-weary troops “deploy for a third or fourth combat tour in an escalating war that surrounds our troops with 360-degree combat 24 hours per day” — which could run up a tab of $700 billion. The only way to control this monster expense is routine claim denial.
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