"Less Lethal, More Traumatic" or Johnny Got His Gun Redux

The flap over Donald Rumsfeld being too cheap to buy enough armor may well have been another smoke screen providing cover for much more serious developments last week.



First there was the mysteriously shrinking number of U.S. casualties in Iraq. Did you notice? Now that we're told only about the number of "combat deaths," the total stands at modest "about 1,000."



But only a few weeks ago, before we limited the count to those killed "in combat" the total was 1,276 U.S. fatalities and 9,556 wounded. (Of course we've never reported the 14,619 confirmed Iraqi dead and we completely ignored the estimate in the journal The Lancet of more than 100,000 dead.)



But the real news should have been the stories behind the "good news" about the high "survival rates" of U.S. wounded ... good news in that at least they aren't dead ... good news only if you never, ever think about the lives that lie ahead for these young sons and daughters.



"This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past," said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who researched military medicine and wrote about it in the New England Journal of Medicine. The journal also published a five-page spread of 21 military photographs that graphically depict the horrific injuries and conditions under which these modern-day MASH surgeons operate.



We thought a lot about it," said the journal's editor, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, and ultimately decided the pictures told an important story. "This war is producing unique injuries - less lethal but more traumatic," he said. In one traumatic case, Gawande tells of an airman who lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. "How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question," Gawande writes.



For Christmas, Woodburydadd wants each of you to have a copy of Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun. And if you're not likely to read the whole thing there's his film version which, sadly most Americans never saw except as a clip in a Metallica video entitled One.*



Los Angeles Times - Army Doctors Scrambling, Report Says



San Diego Union - U.S. Medical Advances May Mask Wars' Human Cost

*Dalton Trumbo was an American who wrote Johnny Got His Gun in 1939 just before Hitler invaded Poland. The novel's strong anti-war message offended many Americans at a time of war and enraged J. Edgar Hoover who launched an FBI investigation of the author that ultimately led to Trumbo's persecution by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. After twenty years of effort Trumbo finally managed to produce a film version which opened to critical acclaim in 1971 ... but U.S. studios refused to distribute the film, and so it played to only a few limited audiences in this country. The heavy metal band Metallica used clips from the film in their music video One. (BTW: Even though most of the rest of the world can view Johnny Got His Gun on DVD, there has never been a U.S. encoded version of the film. You'll have to settle for VHS.)