Wounded in Iraq: Shattered bodies, shattered lives

[rodeodance]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/09/15/wounded.perry.btsc/index.html?section=cnn_topstories&eref=yahoo

Wounded in Iraq: Shattered bodies, shattered lives

POSTED: 7:41 a.m. EDT, September 15, 2006



........The U.S. military has now had more than 20,000 troops wounded in Iraq and nearly 2,700 more killed. More than 9,100 of the wounded were unable to return to duty -- their injuries taking them home to their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and children. In the statistical tables and graphs released by the military, they are just numbers with no mention of what combat wounds really look like.

At combat hospitals across Iraq, medics see limbs completely blown off, head "shots and blasts," burns, contusions, compound fractures and bullet wounds to name just a few. An improvised explosive device -- the phrase the military uses to describe the deadliest of insurgent weapons -- doesn't just send shrapnel into the body, it tears the body apart. Americans hear this term every day, as if it's another regular item in the daily news.

What they don't see is what it does to the soldiers. The human body literally shatters and tears. As one doctor told me, "You realize that all we are is a very thin bag of water."

I spent the better part of four weeks reporting from the combat hospital. Soldiers were coming in with legs and arms missing -- limbs sometimes recovered on the streets, bagged up by the combat medics who live with the "fresh trauma" forever............