{"id":2519,"date":"2013-11-14T15:13:28","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T21:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2519"},"modified":"2013-11-14T15:13:28","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T21:13:28","slug":"a-trail-of-tears-how-veterans-return-from-americas-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/a-trail-of-tears-how-veterans-return-from-americas-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"A Trail of Tears: How Veterans Return From America\u2019s Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Ann Jones<\/a>, Tom Dispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

[The text of this piece is an excerpt, slightly adapted, from Ann Jones’s new book\u00a0<\/em>They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story<\/a>, just published by Dispatch Books\/Haymarket Books<\/em>]<\/p>\n

In 2010, I began to follow U.S. soldiers down a long trail of waste and sorrow that led from the battle spaces of Afghanistan to the emergency room of the trauma hospital at Bagram Air Base, where their catastrophic wounds were surgically treated and their condition stabilized.\u00a0 Then I accompanied some of them by cargo plane to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for more surgeries at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, or LRMC (pronounced Larm-See), the largest American hospital outside the United States.<\/p>\n

Once stabilized again, those critical patients who survived would be taken by ambulance a short distance back to Ramstein, where a C-17 waited to fly them across the Atlantic to Dover Air Base in Delaware. There, tall, multilayered ambulances awaited the wounded for the last leg of their many-thousand-mile journey to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. or the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, where, depending upon their injuries, they might remain for a year or two, or more.<\/p>\n

Now, we are in Germany, halfway home.\u00a0 This evening, the ambulance from LRMC heading for the flight line at Ramstein will be full of critical-care patients, so I leave the hospital early and board the plane to watch the medical teams bring them aboard.\u00a0 They\u2019ve done this drill many times a week since the start of the Afghan War.\u00a0 They are practiced, efficient, and fast, and so we are soon in the air again. This time, with a full load.<\/p>\n

Two rows of double bunks flank an aisle down the center of the C-17, all occupied by men tucked under homemade patchwork quilts emblazoned with flags and eagles, the handiwork of patriotic American women. Along the walls of the fuselage, on straight-backed seats of nylon mesh, sit the ambulatory casualities from the Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility (CASF), the holding ward for noncritical patients just off the flight line at Ramstein.<\/p>\n

At the back of the plane, slung between stanchions, are four litters with critical care patients, and there among them is the same three-man CCAT (Critical Care Air Transport) team I accompanied on the flight from Afghanistan. They\u2019ve been back and forth to Bagram again since then, but here they are in fresh brown insulated coveralls, clean shaven, calm, cordial, the doctor busy making notes on a clipboard, the nurse and the respiratory therapist checking the monitors and machines on the SMEEDs. (A SMEED, or Special Medical Emergency Evacuation Device, is a raised aluminum table affixed to a patient\u2019s gurney.) Designed to bridge the patient\u2019s lower legs, a SMEED is now often used in the evacuation of soldiers who don\u2019t have any.<\/p>\n

Here again is Marine Sergeant Wilkins, just as he was on the flight from Afghanistan: unconscious, sedated, intubated, and encased in a vacuum spine board. The doctor tells me that the staff at LRMC removed Wilkins\u2019s breathing tube, but they had to put it back. He remains in cold storage, like some pod-person in a sci-fi film. You can hardly see him in there, inside the black plastic pod. You can\u2019t determine if he is alive or dead without looking at the little needles on the dials of the machines on the SMEED. Are they wavering? Hard to tell.<\/p>\n

Flight Risk<\/strong><\/p>\n

The CCAT team has three other critical patients to think about. They are covered with white sheets and blankets, but it\u2019s easy to see that the second patient is missing both legs. His right hand is swathed in thick bandages, almost as fat as a football. His face is ripped and torn so that his features appear to be not quite where they belong, but pushed up and to one side — his nose split and turned askew. He\u2019s sedated and on a ventilator meant to assist his breathing, but his chest convulses as he struggles with the job.<\/p>\n

\"jonessoldiers<\/a>The respiratory therapist hovers, checking monitors, adjusting a breathing tube, and the man quiets. But not for long. The IED blast that took off both his legs above the knee bypassed his pelvis to slam into his chest. He must have been doubled over, crouching, when he walked onto the bomb. The impact damaged his lungs in ways not yet fully understood, so that now when he breathes on his own, every breath costs him more than he has to give.<\/p>\n

The CCAT team confers. To stop the convulsive effort to breathe, the doctor can paralyze him and let the ventilator do the work of respiration, but that means removing from his intestine the feeding tube pumping in the calories he needs to heal these catastrophic wounds. It\u2019s a fine line, and the team walks it for the next hour until it\u2019s clear the man needs rest more than nourishment. Then the doctor administers a drug, the body grows still as stone, and the soldier inside sleeps softly while the ventilator steadily breathes in and breathes out.<\/p>\n

Patient number three is breathing on his own and fast asleep, a saline drip feeding into his arm. He looks okay, but for the flattening of the blanket under the SMEED. He\u2019s lost both legs, but both below the knee. He has his hands. He has his junk. Of these four patients, he\u2019s the one the military and the media will call \u201clucky.\u201d But the doctor doesn\u2019t call him that. He says, \u201cYou can\u2019t assess his injuries in comparison to those of other soldiers who happen to be on the same plane. You have to assess them in comparison to who he was before.\u201d He is a boy who used to have legs and now he doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The fourth CCAT patient is a darkly handsome kid who lost both legs to an IED. His right arm ends in a bulbous bandage, but something about its shape suggests the hand might still be all there. He\u2019s conscious and breathing on his own, vaguely gazing at a thin woman in blond boots and a light jacket who stands next to his litter and clutches at the rail as if to hold herself upright.<\/p>\n

She was called to LRMC because her son was close to death, but she is now taking him home, what\u2019s left of him, alive. In the dim light, she looks dazed, but she leans over him and speaks into his ear and soon he sleeps. The doctor tells me that the boy, a Marine, lost one leg below the knee, and the other very high up — too high for him to wear a prosthetic leg.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019ll be in a wheel chair,\u201d the doctor says. \u201cIt\u2019s doubtful he\u2019ll ever walk. His right arm is all there, but the hand is blasted. He\u2019ll probably lose his fingers at least, but he may have enough of a hand left to power a wheel chair on his own. It\u2019s hard to say. He lost one testicle, too, and part of the penis and urethra. But he could still be fertile. There\u2019s a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cavernous plane is very cold. There\u2019s a blanket on each of the seats along the wall. I wrap myself up and sit down next to my military minder Sergeant Julian, mainly to stay out of the way of the CASF nurses who are busy checking on their patients, getting those on the bunks well settled for the long flight. The mother of the handsome kid has also sunk into a seat next to her son\u2019s litter, but she leans forward, still clutching the bedrail as if to hang on to her boy. She has thrown a blanket around her like a cape, but even at a distance I can see that she\u2019s cold. I pick up a spare blanket and take it to her. She looks up as I hold it out to her wordlessly in the deafening plane. \u201cI\u2019m fine,\u201d she says, loudly enough for me to hear.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour son?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s fine.\u201d She looks at him and changes tense. \u201cHe\u2019s going to be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s good,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s alive. He almost wasn\u2019t, but he\u2019s alive. He\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

I offer the blanket again. \u201cTake it. Keep warm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later I notice that she has made a cocoon of the blankets and slumped over the adjacent seat to sleep. Only toward the end of the flight, when she must be feeling some relief that her son is going to survive it, does she begin to tell me about him. She got word of his injury when he was still in the field hospital in Helmand Province, and she arrived at LRMC from southern California the same day he was brought in from Bagram. Three days later, miraculously, she is bringing him home. Well, not home really, but to the States anyway, to the Naval hospital at Bethesda, Maryland.<\/p>\n

Her son has an older brother who deployed once to Iraq and once to Afghanistan and now is safe at home in California. But this boy, a Marine, had a training accident that left him with a head injury requiring brain surgery. He was medically discharged, but reenlisted and was deployed to Afghanistan. He had been there two months when his unit was assigned to clean up an area another unit had officially cleared of Taliban. You remember the policy: clear, hold, and build. They were doing the hold part when he stepped on the IED. The other Marine, the one who can\u2019t breathe, was hit by the same blast, or maybe another one at the same time. \u201cThey told me how it happened,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t think I heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Months later, I will call her in California to see how her son is getting along. He\u2019s still in the hospital. They\u2019re still working on his wounds. He\u2019s not doing any rehab yet. But the military moved him to San Diego so she and her husband can visit him often. She says he\u2019s doing \u201cfine,\u201d though it will still be many months before he can come home.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, her contractor husband has enlisted his friends to help widen doorways, lower light switches, build ramps, and reconstruct a bathroom on the ground floor for a boy in a wheelchair. It\u2019s a weekend and I can hear them hammering as we talk on the phone. \u201cThey say he\u2019ll always be in a wheelchair,\u201d she says, her voice shaking. \u201cI was in our pool this morning, and I realized that he\u2019ll never be able to get into it by himself. He loves the pool.\u201d I stay on the line, listening to her cry. She says, \u201cHe\u2019s a beautiful swimmer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything Still Hurts\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the plane I talk to some of the ambulatory patients sitting along the walls, wrapped in blankets like so many Pashtuns. Most are hurt just enough to have to be out of action for a while. One boy got a boot caught in the door of an armored vehicle, an MRAP, that wasn\u2019t moving at the time. It\u2019s a long way down from the passenger seat. He broke his arm. He blurts this out, then tells me he worries about what he\u2019s going to say back at his home base. \u201cI can\u2019t tell them I just fell out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another kid dropped a barbell in the gym and broke some bones in his foot. Two others hadn\u2019t recovered from chronic back pain and muscle spasms induced by carrying too much weight. Doctors sent them back downrange to their units two or three times and each time they broke down again. The painkillers had only left them dazed. One says, \u201cEverything still hurts, and you can\u2019t remember what you\u2019re doing, so it makes you nervous. So now they\u2019re sending me home because I guess maybe the pain doesn\u2019t make you so nervous in the U.S. of A.\u201d<\/p>\n

One young man collapsed while jogging at a base in the Persian Gulf. \u201cI need a new valve in my heart,\u201d he says, \u201cso they\u2019re sending me home to get it done there. I\u2019m really lucky they found it. The Army saved my life.\u201d His wife sits beside him, wearing a brand new Frankfurt sweatshirt and a bracelet dripping with gnomes. While the doctors at LRMC assessed her husband\u2019s cardiac function, she went shopping. She tells me confidentially, \u201cI for sure didn\u2019t want to sit around any old hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

An older Army officer calls me over and gestures toward the empty seat by his side. He sits ramrod straight, wrapped in his blanket, and speaks through tight lips as if he fears what might come out of his mouth. \u201cI\u2019ve been in the Army twenty-six years,\u201d he says, \u201cand I can tell you it\u2019s a con.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has been an adviser to the chief counterterrorism officer in Iraq. It\u2019s hard even to imagine what\u2019s involved in work like that, but his version of his job description evidently failed to match the official checklist of his boss. He doesn\u2019t think much of military bosses or politicians or Americans in general who send the lowliest 1% to fight wars that make the other 1%, on the high end, \u201cmonu-fuckin’-mentally rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says he\u2019s going home for \u201cpsych reasons\u201d caused by \u201clife,\u201d and he is never going to deploy again. He has two sons, 21 and 23, in college, \u201cThey won\u2019t have to serve,\u201d he says. \u201cBefore that happens, I\u2019ll shoot them myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask if he has any particular reason to dislike the military so intensely. \u201cWar is absurd,\u201d he says. \u201cBoys don\u2019t know any better. But for a grown man to be trapped in stupid wars — it\u2019s embarrassing, it\u2019s humiliating, it\u2019s absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n

TomDispatch regular<\/em><\/a>\u00a0Ann Jones is the author of a new book,\u00a0<\/em>They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America\u2019s Wars — the Untold Story<\/a>, a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books. Andrew Bacevich has already had this to say about it: \u201cRead this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account — the war Washington doesn\u2019t want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans \u2018support the troops.\u2019\u201d Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is also the author of two books about the impact of war on civilians:\u00a0<\/em>Kabul in Winter\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>War Is Not Over When It\u2019s Over. This article is an excerpt from her new book.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Ann Jones, Tom Dispatch click here for original article [The text of this piece is an excerpt, slightly adapted, from Ann Jones’s new book\u00a0They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story, just published by Dispatch Books\/Haymarket Books] In 2010, I began to follow U.S. soldiers down a long trail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/jonessoldiers.jpg?fit=140%2C250&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2522,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions\/2522"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}