Death at the Army's Hands

Just as the Pentagon failed to anticipate the duration and cost of the Iraq war, it has been woefully unprepared for the waves of wounded who return home needing care. Earnest, hardworking medical personnel haven't been able to handle the deluge. At Fort Knox, Cassidy and more than 200 other soldiers were placed in a newly created Warrior Transition Unit (WTU). The Army is spending $500 million this year on such units, in which troops operate as a military detachment and continue to be paid. After a 2007 Washington Post series focused attention on poor conditions at the service's flagship Walter Reed hospital in Washington, the Army created the units to streamline the care of Army outpatients. There are currently 8,300 soldiers in 35 WTUS. One in 5 suffers from TBI, PTSD or both.

Why do they keep saying this? How many times does it have to be pointed out to reporters by other reporters that the administration not only knew this was going to be a "quagmire" as Cheney put it and become what Stormin Norman warned would be "like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit" when they cared about the loss of life? They knew this would produce years upon years and a multitude of wounded but they didn't care!

Just for a second here, set aside your position on Iraq. This has nothing to do with being for it or against it. This has to do with the troops who were sent there.

Go back and read history, read the speeches, listen to rebroadcasts of speeches they did at the DAV, the VFW and the American Legion conventions. Listen to the words of warnings and consequences they were so concerned about following the Gulf War that they decided to not remove Saddam. Take those words and then compare them to what Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney said about how fast this would be over. They may have told us that, but they didn't believe that. They proved it when they were defending the decision to not take over Iraq after they removed Saddam's forces from Kuwait.

They knew this would happen but did nothing to prepare for it. They knew how many years it would go on at the same time Rumsfeld was saying "It may take six days. It may take six weeks. I doubt six months." because he was involved in the Gulf War and so was Cheney and so was Powell.

This is what is so infuriating about all of this. They knew and did nothing to prepare. As a matter of fact the VA budget was cut in 2005. There are still less doctors and nurses in the VA than there were in the 90's. Nicholson sent back money that he did not spend at the same time there were soldiers coming back with PTSD and committing suicide because they couldn't get in to see a psychiatrist. So please tell me how dare they still use the no one knew copout on this?

Death at the Army's Hands
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 By MARK THOMPSON

Iraqi insurgents wounded Gerald Cassidy in the deafening blast of a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad on Aug. 28, 2006. But it took more than a year for him to die from neglect by the Army that had sent him off to war. When Cassidy returned to the U.S. last April, the Army shipped him to a hospital in Fort Knox, Ky., to get treatment for the excruciating headaches that had accompanied him home. For five months, he made the rounds of Army medical personnel, who couldn't cure a pain that grew steadily worse. Unable to make room for him in a pain-management clinic, the Army increasingly plied him with drugs to dull the torment.

At summer's end, the headaches had grown so intense that Cassidy pleaded once more for help, and his doctor prescribed methadone, a powerful narcotic. The next day, calls to Cassidy's cell phone from his wife Melissa went unanswered. After two more days without word from her husband, she frantically called the Army and urged that someone check on him. Nine hours later, two soldiers finally unlocked the door to his room. They found Cassidy slumped in his chair, dead, his laptop and cold takeout chicken wings on his desk.

The "manner of death" was summed up at the end of the 12-page autopsy: "Accident." But when he died, Cassidy had the contents of a locked medicine cabinet coursing through his body, powerful narcotics and other drugs like citalopram, hydromorphine, morphine and oxycodone, as well as methadone. The drugs--both the levels that Cassidy took and "their combined, synergistic actions," in the medical examiner's words--killed him.

Horrifyingly, it appears that Cassidy lived for up to two days after falling into a stupor. Forgotten and alone, he sat in his room until he died. "My God, he was there for three days, and no one even found him. That's a huge scandal," says Dr. William Kearney, Cassidy's Army psychiatrist. Regulations that require a soldier to show up for formation three times a day or be tracked down were widely ignored, say soldiers who stayed at Fort Knox. "You could easily linger for two days in a coma," Kearney says, "and if anybody had opened his door, they would have found him unconscious and they would have called 911."

go here for the rest

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713485,00.html