Brain trauma takes toll on soldiers (Knight-Ridder)

[diamond14]

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/nation/8817831.htm

Posted on Wed, Jun. 02, 2004

Brain trauma takes toll on soldiers

BY JOHN SIMERMAN

Knight Ridder Newspapers


PALO ALTO, Calif. - (KRT) - Alec Giess clicked off an episode of "M*A*S*H*" and rose gingerly from his hospital bed, carrying nothing but the dull, merciless pain on the right side of his head.
"Punch drunk," is how the Oregon National Guardsman describes the muddle in his brain.

Rigoberto Oceguera feels that way, too. Sometimes, the 22-year-old Army specialist cries for no reason. Just bursts out in tears. He also found God, though he can't quite explain how or why.

Their new duty station, in military parlance, is here at the Veterans Administration hospital, in one of four VA traumatic brain injury sites nationwide.

Here come the invisibly damaged, those with brains that, as Oceguera puts it, "get confused and start wobbling around." Their numbers are growing.

The swelling toll of dead and wounded U.S. soldiers has the Palo Alto center bracing for more with traumatic brain injuries. Last week, the center was directed to add beds to meet the demand.

Traumatic brain injuries are nothing new in war zones. But Iraq is producing a higher rate of returning wounded than previous wars, military medical officials say. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center alone, doctors have identified more than 280 cases of traumatic brain injury in the past year, most from Iraq.

[saigon68]

1. A lot of them will some day be Homeless drunks

Urinating in their Pants on the streets of Amerika

[DoktorGreg]

2. Our town just recently got our first Bush War 2 homeless veteran

eom

[peacetalksforall]

3. Experimented on?

That finding God statement is curious. Not knowing how or why.

[BrotherBuzz]

6. Experimented on?

This is the same small VA hospital where Ken Kesey did his CO duty, and indeed, was the inspiration for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

[diamond14]

4. the invisible injuries: brain damage and depleted uranium damage

BOTH are a ghastly legacy of bush* and his WARS....

we currently have over 18,000 homeless people living on the streets of OUR Nation's Capital, Washington DC....over 60% of them are OUR VETERANS......

bush* could trip over a lot of homeless human beings if he ever came out of the White House and walked around....


'compassionate conservative' cheap-labor reTHUGlicans in my neighborhood ALWAYS remark callously: well, they ought to get up and get a job. They treat them like some kind of sub-humans...



John Kerry shaking hands with a homeless Veteran in Washington DC
Sunday, May 30, 2004

[Philostopher]

5. Many of them are people who would have been dead.

Because of the efficiency of the body armor, many of these people would simply have been dead in a prior military action. Wouldn't they have to be warehousing hundreds to thousands of armless, legless future vets somewhere? The active duty people will probably just be fitted with prosthetics and shuffled off into office jobs, since none of them were literally drafted (and so have time to serve even after critical injuries), but the reservists are another matter entirely. I know the casualty-to-death rate is, supposedly, higher this time because of the current body armor.

I don't know, it's hard to tell anymore when I'm being tinfoil-hat paranoid and when it's a realistic estimation of the Administration's ability to lie and willingness to torment its own pawns for public relations purposes, but I wonder how long after the election in November we'll be greeted with a rush of crippled reservists.

(edited for clarity)