NYDailyNews: The casualties of war (The Wounded-Great Article)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/202419p-174685c.html

For every flag-draped coffin the American people aren't allowed to see coming home from Iraq, there are at least four other casualties of war like Spec. Roy Harper they don't hear about, either.

Only last January, the 29-year-old National Guardsman was stocking shelves at the Target store in upstate Saratoga Springs, anxiously awaiting the birth of his second child.

Last week, after miraculously surviving a piece of shrapnel that ripped open his aorta and nearly killed him, Harper was the first of 43 G.I.s admitted one morning to the Pentagon's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. The wounded arrive here with grim regularity from "Downrange" the hospital staff's euphemism for the Iraq and Afghan conflicts.

Dazed and bewildered, Harper was the first of three critically ill patients loaded off the rear of a blue hospital bus from nearby Ramstein Air Base after an eight-hour flight from the combat zone. He was on a respirator, portable devices monitored his vital signs, and a CCAT (critical care air-transportable team) in rubber gloves anxiously hovered around him. An Army chaplain delivered a benediction as Harper was loaded onto a gurney and wheeled into the intensive care unit.

<snip>

One National Guardsman wounded by an IED in Iraq said this.
Asked whether he planned to vote for President Bush in November, he sarcastically replied, "Yeah, right."

[NMDemDist2]

1. this is the saddest part of the war news to me

all those young people's lives changed forever. Let's make sure we stay on our congresscritter's backs about funding the Veteran's Administration to assist these folks