War nurses make quick adjustment

[rainbow4321]

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/042805dntexnurses.534d937f.html

<snip>

Unlike the battlefield soldiers they patch up, combat nurses have less time to readjust to their normal work routines – three half-days of training compared with two weeks for soldiers. This follows a week of decompression in Iraq. Nurses can take a 30-day leave, but most don't.

But Maj. Garcia says some of her thoughts remain fixed on Iraq. The 31st was the primary destination for wounded GIs, civilian contract workers, U.S. government employees and Iraqi police and residents caught up in the daily wave of terrorist attacks. About 100 soldiers a week were treated and shipped out to Germany for transit to a stateside hospital.

"We all learned very quickly," Maj. Garcia says. "It's the kind of work we've trained for. But ... I didn't expect the significant number of casualties we encountered in even that first week. These were the wounds that nightmares are made of."


Extensive burns. Ruined limbs. Muscles ripped by bullets. As soon as one patient moved out of a bed, another moved in.


<snip>

[leesa]

1. As though they have a choice. Patch em up, ship em out.

[AndyTiedye]

2. Just How Many Wounded GIs Are There?

They never seem to publish that figure.

[rainbow4321]

3. Well, if this one nurse was there a year..

and says she saw around 100/WEEK be injured bad enough to get sent to Germany and back to the US, that would be, give or take, around 5,000/year..and that number is just from ONE nurse and doesn't seem to include the soldiers who were NOT imjured badly enough to be sent off.
SOMEone in the shrub regime has to have the real number of injured but those stats are probably buried so deep that it will never see the light of day.