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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Iraq senders knew it all, troops did not have a clue

Warrior Transition Units Help Soldiers Heal
Reporting
Jim Benemann FORT CARSON, Colo. (CBS4) ― The United States military has formed special units to help wounded soldiers recover from the injuries of war. One of the so-called Warrior Transition Units (WTU) is at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs.

A leader at the WTU in Fort Carson said the driving force behind the concept was a report last year on the volume of injured soldiers going through Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington, D.C.

"We never anticipated the length of the war," she said. "We never anticipated the volume of causalities that were going to come out of both Afghanistan and Iraq and our system needed to grow, needed to change, needed to evolve."
Specialist Michael Janke served in Iraq and was injured when a grenade exploded three feet in front of him.

"And I woke up and I just wasn't right," Janke said. "I had a lot of pain in my head. And I wasn't aware of my surroundings.

"I live with pain all day long. When it's really bad, I can't move."

Janke is assigned to Fort Carson's WTU where multiple caseworkers are assigned to help him recover and map out his future. The philosophy brings military structure to the healing process.

The WTU has its own campus at the mountain post with 164 staff serving 600 recovering soldiers. The healing soldiers live together and eat together in their own area.
go here for more
http://cbs4denver.com/local/warrior.transition.unit.2.733580.html


Again, the problems encountered with by invading Iraq were all known ahead of time and all of the people involved with doing this, knew what would happen. Their words of caution captured on tape and video for generations to see. Interviews on PBS, speeches in front of veterans groups, all answering why they did not take Iraq after Saddam's forces were pushed out of Kuwait. It's all documented and recorded for history. The problem is that no one learned anything from it when the people doing the most warning, seemed to change their minds and were asked nothing about what they said back then. The devastation left behind was no surprise to any of the planners but the American public was left out of the loop. What's worse is that the troops were all left out of it as well. No one told them about the warning Stormin Norman gave about Iraq becoming "like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit" or the warning Cheney gave about "a quagmire" or Bush 41's warning that it would created "countless losses" or any of the other warnings.

All of this was known but no one considered the troops who would have to pay the price with their bodies, their minds and their lives. Right now after the release of McClellan's tell all book, the media should finally put two and two together and demand answers. None of this was unknown but too much of it was left undone and no one prepared for any of the wounded this would create.

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