Moving story from NYT December 30, 2003 A Soldier's Return, to a Dark and Moody World By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN LAIRSVILLE, Pa., Dec. 24 — Jeremy Feldbusch joined the Army to travel the world. Now the only place he can go by himself is the 40 steps from his bed to the reclining chair in the living room. The stucco walls guide him, past the bathroom, kitchen and closet, past the photographs of him in football jacket and wrestling singlet, past the coffee table, where he sometimes stubs his toe. At last, he finds his chair. "Mom!" he yelled on a recent day. "I want a drink of some drinky stuff!" "How about water?" his mother said back. "No! Mountain Dew!" "O.K., Jeremy, O.K." Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, a fit, driven, highly capable Army Ranger, left home in February knowing the risks of combat. Two months later, he came home blind. A growing number of young men and women are returning from Iraq and trying to resume lives that were interrupted by war and then minced by injury. Sergeant Feldbusch, a moody 24-year-old, is one of them, back in a little town in western Pennsylvania, in a little house overlooking trees and snow-blanketed hills he cannot see. "What happened to my plans to become an officer? Gone," Sergeant Feldbusch said. "Can I ever jump in my truck again and just take off? No. Do I always have to be with my mom or dad now? Yep." Since the war started, more than 2,300 American soldiers in Iraq have been hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs. But as the insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming a hallmark of this war. "There's that little area between where the helmet ends and the body armor starts," said Dr. Jeffrey Poffenbarger, an Army neurosurgeon. "And we're seeing a lot of guys getting hit right there, right in the face." Back home, one little piece of metal can turn an entire household upside down. Charlene Feldbusch stopped working to take care of her son. She rubs cream on his face in the morning, helps him pick out his clothes, fixes him meals and gives him pills at night so he does not shake. His father, Brace, started writing a book about him. "He's been such an inspiration to me, accomplishing more at 24 than I have my entire life," said Brace Feldbusch, a former coal miner who lost two fingers to a coal cart before he lost his job. He ticked off the chapters, his son's greatest moments: winning the state freestyle wrestling championship; bench-pressing 405 pounds; graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, a biology major, the only member of the family to finish college; becoming an Army Ranger. His two brothers, Shaun, 25, and Brian, 17, sometimes feel left out. "But they understand our entire world has changed," Ms. Feldbusch said. "Somebody has to be with Jeremy all the time. But that's O.K. I'm his mom. And that's what moms do." During the two months Jeremy Feldbusch spent recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, his parents lived at his bedside. Charlene Feldbusch remembers one day seeing a young female soldier crawling past her in the corridor with no legs and her 3-year-old son trailing behind. Ms. Feldbusch started to cry. But not for the woman. "Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw those people without arms or legs and thought, Why couldn't this be my son? Why his eyes?" Artillery shells make a certain sound when they are coming right at you. Not a looping whistle, but a short shriek. On April 3, Sergeant Feldbusch, a 6-foot-2-inch, thickly built mortar man, heard the shriek. He and his platoon of Rangers were guarding the Haditha Dam, a strategic point northwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River, when a shell burst 100 feet away and a piece of red hot shrapnel hit him in the face. The last thing he remembers was eating a pouch of chicken teriyaki. The inchlong piece of steel, part of the artillery shell's casing, sliced through his right eye, tumbled through his sinuses and lodged in the left side of his brain, severely damaging the optic nerve of his left eye and spraying bone splinters throughout his brain. Two weeks later, at the Brooke Army Medical Center, doctors removed the shrapnel and reconstructed his face with titanium mesh and a lump of fat from his stomach in place of his missing eye, so the hole would not cave in. For five weeks, Sergeant Feldbusch remained in a coma. When he came out, it was still black...
Sadly the chickenhawks who deceived America into this war have avoided this type of sacrifice for them and their children.
There are a few thousand more stories like this. The Bushies' support among those who can't or won't serve won't waver regardless. http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/...mand=viewone&op=t&id=46&rnd=332.7169496759236 12-29-2003 Hack's Target Saddam in the Slammer, so why are we on Orange? By David H. Hackworth Almost daily we’re told that another American soldier has sacrificed life or limb in Iraq. For way too many of us – unless we have a white flag with a blue star in our window – these casualty reports have become as big a yawn as a TV forecast of the weather in Baghdad. Even I – and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week – was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq – about the number of warriors in a line tank division. We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA! Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries. Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire. Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations: Orthopedic surgery – 3,907 General surgery – 1,995 Internal medicine – 1,291 Psychiatric – 1,167 Neurology – 1,002 Gynecological – 491 Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed – Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal. Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because “in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.” The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it’s safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA. So at the end of this turbulent year, we must ask ourselves: Was the price our warriors paid in blood worth the outcome? Are we any safer than before our pre-emptive invasion? Even though Saddam is in the slammer and the fourth-largest army in the world is junkyard scrap, Christmas 2003 was resolutely Orange, and 2004 looks like more of the same. Or worse. Our first New Year’s resolution should be to find out if the stated reasons for our pre-emptive strike – Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s connection with al-Qaeda – constituted a real threat to our national security. Because, contrary to public opinion, the present administration hasn’t yet made the case that Saddam and his sadists aided and abetted al-Qaeda's attacks on 9/11. We also need to know why our $30 billion-a-year intelligence agencies didn’t read the tea leaves correctly, as well as what’s being done besides upgrading the color code to prevent other similar strikes. Congress should get with the program and lift a page from the U.S. Army handbook on how to learn from a military operation. When an Army-training or actual-combat op is concluded, all the key players assemble for an honest, no-holds-barred critique of everything that’s gone down – the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of the participants might walk away black and blue, but everyone learns from the mistakes. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and retired Gen. Tommy Franks should be required to report to a congressional committee convened to investigate both the invasion and the planning – or lack of planning – for the occupation of Iraq. This committee must operate without the political skullduggery that occurred during the numerous investigations into the Pearl Harbor catastrophe – when high-level malfeasance that cost thousands of lives and put America’s national security in extreme jeopardy was repeatedly covered up for more than 50 years. Our Iraqi casualties deserve nothing less than the unvarnished truth. Only then will their sacrifices not have been in vain. And only then can we all move on with the enlightenment we need to protect and preserve our precious country’s future. The address of David Hackworth's home page is Hackworth.com. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. His newest book is “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts.” © 2003 David H. Hackworth.
