Today’s Must ReadSalon’s headline, “The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq,” pretty much sums it up.
On February 15th at Fort Benning, GA, Salon reports,
Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division’s 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier’s “physical profile,” an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier’s physical limitations because of medical problems — from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers’ profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.
Salon interviewed a number of the soldiers who were declared fit enough for deployment, including a soldier whose spine is “separating,” one who “corkscrewed” his spine, one who “suffers from degenerative disk disease,” and another with chronic sleep apnea.
As a captain at Ft. Benning tells him (the one with the corkscrewed spine): “It is a numbers issue with this whole troop surge… They are just trying to get those numbers.”
Of course, this is just one Army base and just one unit. Maybe the perfunctory examination was the inspiration of one commander there. Or maybe not:
Other soldiers slated to leave for Iraq with injuries said they wonder whether the same thing is happening in other units in the Army. “You have to ask where else this might be happening and who is dictating it,” one female soldier told me. “How high does it go?”
