“The war on terror wasn’t in Iraq till we went there..We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in.” - Sgt. 1st Class Larry Daniels
Posted : September 28, 2004 at 6:32 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
[via AMERICAblog]
At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives.
They’re the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq….
They’re convinced U.S. soldiers will be fighting, dying and getting maimed in Iraq for many years to come….
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.” ….
In another room, 23-year-old Mark Romero from the army’s Third Brigade is also nursing a broken arm. A mechanic who served 11 months in Iraq, he snapped a bone trying to stop a 230 kilogram metal door from falling on a fellow soldier.
Lodged in his back is a piece of shrapnel from mortars that rained through the roof of the gym at the U.S. base in Mosul, northern Iraq, while Romero was working out.
He says the question constantly asked by soldiers is: “What are we doing there?”….
If Americans understood what was really going on in Iraq, they’d pressure Bush to be clearer about “why we’re really fighting,” he says.
“The war on terror wasn’t in Iraq till we went there,” he says. “We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in.”
As a soldier, he describes himself as “almost a political prisoner” in the sense that he can’t express himself on whether he believes U.S. soldiers should stay in Iraq.
But his 33-year-old wife, Cheryl, has no qualms about speaking her mind.
…
I would encourage you to read the article. The problem is Larry’s Commander-in-Chief (President Bush) and almost half of his countrymen do not get it or are not willing to accept that they committed a blunder of gigantic proportions. And that makes the story of these 7000-odd injured US soldiers all the more painful.
How can you fix a problem if you don’t accept that there is a problem to begin with?
- Anand
Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004