Who sent our troops to Iraq without body armor?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

It wasn't Kerry.
It WAS Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld. And 87 billion dollars- heck, all the money in the world- couldn't put that horse back in the barn.

Bush is seriously deluded if he thinks he has a clue about being an effective Commander in Chief, and everyone in this country needs to know this.

[Sweetpea]

1. Body armor

I remember being on a military base last year in N. Jersey and the Red Cross was collecting things like toothbrushes, snacks, cards etc.....for the troops. I guess amenities are difficult to come by as well.

[knitter4democracy]

3. They are

It's really bad, from what I hear. One woman here in Kalamazoo was trying to get air conditioners for her son's unit after finding out that the Army was short on them. Our troops aren't even provided for when it comes to the basics: there's a woman in Ohio (and another group as well) trying to get socks and slippers to our troops, especially those on ships. Our ships are kept at about fifty degrees, and everything is metal. The Navy just provides thin cotton socks, so everyone goes around wearing boots all the time and double socks when they go to bed. If they can't even keep them warm on a ship, what else aren't they providing?

[Paradise]

2. It's so frustrating to hear * shamelessly, blatantly twist the facts,

and, as we know, these lies will be adopted, repeated, a n d believed by many.

[cease_fire]

4. IF money for body armor was such an issue..

Why not take a few, just a FEW million dollars from one of them there Hall-o-Burton NO-BID contracts and re-allocate it to provide our soldiers with some protection.

I don't want to hear about a lack of funds caused by a Kerry No vote.

We some how saw our way clear to paying Mercs a thousand dollars a day (about the price of one good bullet proof vest) to meander around protecting Oil Pipelines...

So, deploy the 20,000 Mercs for 1 day less and Armor up our troops that make minimum wage.

The outrage about this is just stupid. How, in good faith can anyone tell the American people that the 87 million dollar supplemental bill has anything to do with poorly equipping our troops is beyond me.

If our troops don't have the right equipment, then we were not prepared for this conflict (old news at this point).

There's plenty of money for this - it's just not being spent in the right place. Body Armor for a US soldier doesn't net a profit for the Corporations. Good food and plenty of water for boots on the ground doesn't raise the volume of oil from a pipeline.

That should be the next letter from Mary Beth Cahill to Shrubs campaign manager.

[porphyrian]

5. ...but...but it wasn't his fault...

...it was the company contracted to deliver them from the company contracted to make them to the company contracted to distribute them who's to blame. Of course, it's all basically the same company, but outsourcing is so much more efficient, you know.

[funkybutt]

6. Randi Rhodes said that * and his boys

basically didn't write the body armor into the budget they got passed. They wanted the american people to believe this war was going to cost us so little (financially).

It's really terrible to hear that our troops are doing without so many of the basics. Anyone have any contact info for where we can send care packages? My coworkers and I prepared 2 early in the war but one was sent back. I'm guessing we didn't have the right address.

[soup]

7. What brought this up?

Are soldiers still being deployed without body armor? There was an uproar over this and the vehicles without extra protective plating last year. I backed off on the letter writing because I thought it was being resolved. Shame on me?

I don't know if these links are still valid, they're old.

-----

All Deployed Soldiers Should Have Body Armor by November
October 21, 2003


All soldiers in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan should have interceptor body armor by the end of November, members of a key House subcommittee were told Oct. 21, but several congressmen wanted to know what they could do to speed up the process.
>snip<
http://www.ausa.org/www/news.nsf/0/4b6b06487c1a59c285256dc7004bc974?OpenDocument&AutoFramed



>snip<
For the fiancee of one reservist headed to Iraq next month, body armor seems like the engagement gift that keeps on giving.

Inexplicably and shamefully, nearly one-fourth of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq still wait to be issued the type of ceramic body armor approved by Congress back in April. Some mix-up about not being able to make and ship the things fast enough.

So, during work breaks, the Seattle woman scans sites like Tamiami.com for just the right Iraq accessory.

>snip<
After seven months with her child in Iraq, it has sunk in for Vicky Monk whose 20-year-old son, Tim Monk, is a light infantry specialist with the First Armored Division in Baghdad. Still, although Tim is one of the lucky ones to be issued a vest fitted with pockets filled with ceramic plates, "Sometimes I feel very, very helpless with him in the worst place in the world," she said.

>snip<
Monk doesn't limit herself to shopping. Unlike some, she has taken to criticizing shortages in Iraq including the armor plates intended for but missing from the backs, sides and bottoms of too many of the Humvees that encounter land mines.

She feels that support for the war is eroding here at home. And she believes that President Bush is trying to de-emphasize the American death toll. "The administration has even changed the name 'body bags' to 'transfer tubes,' " she said. And she was incensed when Bush was photographed hugging those who had lost homes in the California firestorms but is not photographed at the funerals of American soldiers.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/paynter/148369_paynter17.html



December 14, 2003

BAGHDAD -- Pfc. Gregory Stovall felt the explosion on his face. He was standing in the turret of a Humvee, manning a machine gun, when the roadside bomb went off. At the time, he was guarding a convoy of trucks making a mail run.

In an instant, Stovall's face was perforated by shrapnel, the index finger on his right hand was gone, and the middle finger was hanging by a tendon. But the 22-year-old from Brooklyn remembers instinctively reaching for his chest and stomach -- "to make sure everything was there," he said.

>skip to bottom of article<
Before approving the administration's $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress added hundreds of millions of dollars for more body armor, armored Humvees and other systems to protect soldiers.

Now, three manufacturers are working overtime to produce the 80,000 vests and 160,000 plates required to outfit everyone in Iraq by the end of the year. Assembly lines are producing 25,000 sets a month.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1762/4263346.html




December 28, 2003
>snip<
Eliot Cohen, a professor of national security studies at Johns Hopkins University, said that 3,117 service members "is, indeed, a lot of casualties." But the effect, he said, is being mitigated by a number of factors, including improved medical care and body armor, that are keeping far more troops alive, and an almost total ban on news coverage of the wounded as they return to the United States at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. While stories have been written and broadcast about individual casualties recuperating from wounds received in Iraq, there has been almost no coverage in the media of large aircraft arriving almost nightly at Andrews carrying war wounded from the battlefield. Similarly, press coverage of bodies arriving at the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has been prohibited.
http://www.heraldnet.com/Stories/03/12/28/17953671.cfm


Posted on Mon, Dec. 29, 2003

Army deliberately shortchanged Guard on gear, officials say
BY PHILIP DINE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

>snip<
Insufficient radar equipment or other major gear for Guard units is bad enough, Hargett said, but he can't accept the failure to meet "the basic needs of soldiers" - such as proper uniforms, boots, cold weather gear.

"We sent people over without the desert camouflage. We were told they would get them when they got over there. Some did, some didn't," Hargett said.

John Goheen, chief spokesman for the National Guard Association, said, "The perception of many of the units over there is, they're not as important as their active-duty counterparts."
>snip<

Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett, commander of the Tennessee National Guard, is chairman of the National Guard Association of the United States, which represents Guard members. He also advises the secretary of the Army on Reserve policy.

Hargett spoke recently with two members of the Guard's 1175th Transportation Company from Tennessee, which carries soldiers between Kuwait and the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

He related: "One of them told me: `In Desert Storm, I was an active guy. I never knew until now that the Guard and Reserves got treated so differently. We have been promised and promised and promised body armor, and nothing's happened. Meanwhile, we're hauling active-duty guys just arriving in country - with body armor.' "
>snip<
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/7590616.htm

RAGE RAGE RAGE