Pentagon sending injured troops back to Iraq

Even troops that have been declared by doctors as unfit for battle are forced to return to Iraq.  It underscores how thin our armed forces have been stretched over the last few years. Salon's Mark Benjamin gets to the bottom of it:

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit ofthe Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deployingtroops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIswho doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are tooinjured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medicalconditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to ameeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are themen responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Armydocument that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physicallimitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire aweapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-secondincrements to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim thatthe division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers'profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq.

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Most of our country is completely disconnected from this war.  Only soldiers and their families are being affected.  If there was a draft, these abuses would have been exposed much earlier.

Even as someone that graduated college just three months ago, I truly think that some brave lawmaker on Capitol Hill needs to push for the reinstatement of the draft.  The Iraq war would end, and we would have a genuine national discussion each time we even think about sending people my age into the line of fire.

Comments

[Tony]

This information should get just as much exposure as the Walter Reed situation. I'd like to see the spin the administration puts out about supporting the troops with this one.

[Administrator: Todd]

Tony, I bet you that this is probably the half of it. More will keep coming out as the year goes on.

The whole Walter Reed ordeal is what happens when you outsource government assistance to companies whose only goal is the least-cost solution -- even though we pay them five-times more than trained government workers.