'To Iraq and Back' an ABC special features reporter, Bob Woodruff, injured while reporting in Iraq.

Traumatic Brain Injury - TBI - heard of it? Of the over 200,000 (that's right 200 thousand) injured troops in Iraq, a quarter of those suffer traumatic brain injury. That is a quite high percentage but what is more astonishing is that the smaller VA hospital/centers don't have the knowledge, equipment, people power, professionals to deal with it. I don't suppose it would surprise anyone to realize that TBI is another one of those 'issues' being sanitized and swept out of public view.

Thanks to the courage of ABC journalist/reporter, Bob Woodruff, and ABC's willingness to air it, special tv production 'To Iraq and Back' finds a middle ground arena (not slung with partisan politics) to try to educate the public on the plight of many of these injured, returning soldiers. If you didn't get chance to see it last night on tv, you can watch the online video here at ABC website.

Bob Woodruff was injured while reporting in Iraq, and he has made a recovery from his own traumatic brain injury (TBI) many in the medical profession view as remarkable. Which isn't to say he has completely recovered, rather that he has learned to compensate and inspires hope for other soldiers trying to adjust to life with TBI. He has made this tv special, 'To Iraq and Back' which aired on ABC, Tuesday night, Feb 27, 2007.

It chronicles his life starting from the IED explosion he experienced in the humvee in Iraq, the evac and medical journey, and his efforts at recovery. You will see some graphic reality. You will see Bob (and other soldiers) with half his head blown off, in recovery, with what is becoming the traditional 'helmet' TBI survivors wear and you will see glimpses of his efforts to retrain his memory.

As Bob goes back to the medical and hospital staff to thank them, he interviews them along the way and the viewer gets some firsthand information from those who have an up close and personal view of the enormity of injuries sustained by our troops. He then visits some of the soldiers on the humvee with him when the IED exploded.

He visits with other soldiers who have TBI and talks with the soldiers and their families about the resources or lack of resources after being released from the primary hospitals - Walter Reed and Bethesda. As those soldiers return to their homes in communities across the nation, the VA resources are not up to speed in treating them for TBI. (Most of you who know much about VA resources, already know the shortages of hospitals, centers, staff and services) .

Bob talks also with new VA Secretary, Jim Nicholson, or perhaps interviews him, because it looks very much to me like Jim Nicholson, is very uncomfortable with the questions Bob Woodruff puts to him. And they are not challenging or difficult questions, more straightforward kinds of questions, deserving of factual and straightforward answers. Something Jim Nicholson does not provide. His responses seem to me like efforts to minimize the severity and seriousness and strike me as the kind of defensive answers one gives when one knows what one is being asked reveals a truth being cloaked.


Mentioned in the tv show is Wounded Warriors Project - please see their website and help in whatever ways you can.

Excerpt from Wounded Warriors Project on Bob Woodruff's 'To Iraq and Back'

On Tuesday, February 27th at 10pm (EST), ABC will air the much anticipated special featuring ABC News Anchor Bob Woodruff's injury and rehabilitation after suffering a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) while covering the war in Iraq.

This September, the Wounded Warrior Project had the distinct pleasure of meeting Bob in Washington DC at a TBI Caregiver Summit. The goal of the summit was to bring together family caregivers of service members who have incurred serious traumatic brain injuries during the war against terror and facilitate a dialogue between these family caregivers and key policy and legislative decision makers in Washington.

Part of this summit and a roundtable discussion between Bob and the family caregivers (and some patients themselves) will be included in the piece.

Another excerpt:

At a hearing held last June by the House of Representatives Committee on Veterans Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Health Jonathan Perlin testified that, “Traumatic Brain Injury accounts for almost 25 percent of combat casualties suffered in OIF/OEF by US Forces.” With over 20,000 combat injuries to date during the ongoing global war on terror, this means that there are almost 5,000 service members suffering from traumatic brain injuries. While advances in body armor and battlefield medicine save the lives of many soldiers, they do not protect against impacts that cause brain injury.

An excerpt from Discover Magazine, article Dead Men Walking; What sort of future do brain-injured Iraq veterans face.

While the Pentagon has yet to release hard numbers on brain-injured troops, citing security issues, brain-injury professionals express concern about the range of numbers reported from other military-related sources like the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). One expert from the VA estimates the number of undiagnosed TBIs at over 7,500. Nearly 2,000 brain-injured soldiers have already received some level of care, but the TBIs—human beings reduced to an abbreviation—keep coming.

Award winning photo of injured Marine at his wedding

Courage comes in many forms; Award winning photo of wedding - returning injured Iraq Marine marries his high school sweetheart. Credit to the young woman for her own kind of courage, and credit to this amazing couple for finding a different kind of courage The photo is a hurting kind of photo in that it depicts horrendous injuries suffered by our young troops, yet the couple seem able to transcend and find their own hearts. Since yesterday was Valentine's Day, somehow it seems the right time to share this story.

I picked the below extract from a feeder and placing it here. I was undecided about using it in exact format since it pulls out the nature of the young Marine's injuries, and while that goes to the story, the couple's courage in facing this adversity is a more telling story, so I added some additional extracts.

Nina Berman won a prize in the 2007 World Press Photo contest for this heartbreaking photo of a badly wounded Iraqi war veteran and his childhood sweetheart on their wedding day.

Their story is here.

excerpts;

Ty was on his second tour of duty in Iraq and had been patrolling the streets in a truck with six marines around al-Qaim, an entry point for foreign fighters on the Syrian border. He had been there for five months, and the mission had become routine. “Mostly we just rode around and came back. The atmosphere was not particularly menacing. They weren’t shooting guns at us any more.”

Suddenly a suicide bomber blew himself up by his truck. “It felt like somebody just blasted me in the face really hard,” Ty recalls. “I was rolling around on the bed of a truck, yelling the whole time I was conscious. The guy next to me kept putting me out – I guess I kept relighting

"One arm was a stump and his remaining hand had only two fingers. Later, his big toe was grafted on in place of a thumb. One eye was blind and milky, as if melted, and his ears had been burnt away. The top of his skull had been removed and inserted by doctors into the fatty tissue inside his torso to keep it viable and moist for future use."

They were married in October, in their home town of Metamora, Illinois, a small farming community in the Midwest.

In Metamora, people know him well enough not to stare a lot, but he gets plenty of looks elsewhere. Mostly he shrugs it off. “I give people the benefit of the doubt. If you were me, I might look at you.” If they are particularly rude, he will turn and say: “So what were you going to ask me?”

Here are some more of the couple's wedding photos and
more photos of Iraqi vets from Berman here and here.

As a military family , I take exception to use of 'wasted lives' - Barack Obama or anyone else

Barack Obama using the words 'Wasted lives' is the news item today, or at least in my attention field today. Now I full well understand that this can be what media uses to make political hay one way or another. And I understand that when I generate conversation around it, I get to be a tool for one side or the other - blah, blah, blah. I write to a principle beyond that though; or at least it goes beyond political ammunition for me.

Whether Barack Obama said it, or my veteran neighbor said it, or my friend said it, or my family said it, or a stranger said it - it is a poor choice of words, in my opinion, when used as descriptive of soldiers killed in combat. Why use the words, I continue to ask myself, when other choices are more apt descriptions to say that a 'war action' has unnecessarily cut short the lives of so many young people? But 'wasted' lives? No. Up to the point that their lives are cut short in combat deployments, it is a poor definition to describe their lives as wasted. The waste lies with the Administration and politicians who tend to view the lives of our servicemen and women as expendible waste when initiating war actions.

If it was my son or daughter's life cut short in a combat deployment in Iraq (or Afghanistan), I would not be consoled thinking their life 'wasted' and I would be inconsolable that their life was cut short in a wasted war action initiated by a callous Administration. When my son-in-law and nephew are sent on their second deployments to Iraq this year, my worry threshold begins to climb again, having already anxiously awaited the outcome for them from their first deployment in Iraq.

I truly never thought when they deployed in OIF 2003-2004 that by 2007 the U.S. would still be occupying Iraq or that our military troops would be serving in second, third or more deployments. Yet, it is so, and the two in our family, who, incidentally, do have families of their own, will face additional deployments to Iraq. Of course, I earnestly pray for their safe return, but as for all military families who face deployments, family talk has to get to the place of 'what if' he/she doesn't return or returns so severely injured as to be life-changing? That is the reality for military families and troops.

I cite a conversation shared in my daughter's family recently on just this matter. The parents are deciding on their daughter's college entry potential, now that she is in high school. Since Dad will be deploying again to Iraq this year, Mom needs to decide where to best put in the 'waiting time' - at the base where he is stationed; coming home to have family support close at hand; and what about disrupting high school for oldest daughter? It won't be as tough a disruption for the two younger children in elementary school as it will be for their older sister in high school.

As my daughter shares a bit of their decision making with me, I incorrectly come to an erroneous conclusion that it sounds like the decision is being left to my high school granddaughter and I tell my daughter that is perhaps extraordinary guilt to inadvertantly place on her daughter. How will she live with the consequences when Dad deploys to Iraq without feeling some guilt that her decision about where to live and attend high school had something to do with whether he lives, dies, or any other of the potential consequences. Me, an old caseworker, knows children will harbor guilt that they are somehow responsible, often even when the parents allay such untruths, knows the world of children is more often fraught with a child's sense of being responsible for what happens to their parents.

I need not have worried, nor incorrectly interpreted their family conversations. My daughter shares with me how their conversation went. Dad says to high schooler 'We want your input in the decision making. We want you to know that it doesn't matter what base or where the family lives, I'm going to deploy to Iraq anyway and you have some choice about where you want to go to high school. That part of the decision is not going to impact my having to deploy to Iraq, so you don't need to worry about what is going to be best for me or Mom but what is going to be best for you."

How many families share such conversations in the normal course of their lives? Military families do share such conversations since it is left to the troops and military families to carry the burden of this 'war' in Iraq. Perhaps I become over sensitive to the language, words and meanings as the general populations attempt to try to address the changing political climate about the war in Iraq. And I know I am particularly sensitive to the insensitivities of politicians, having met with some to advocate for an end to Iraq war and bringing the troops home....now. Of course, I've been saying 'now' since 2004 and it is now 2007, so the word starts to sound hollow to my own ears...

Not to put too much onus on Senator Barack Obama, in his poor choice of the words 'wasted lives' to describe something which I'm sure he meant other than what it sounded like, I have heard others use that phrase and I find myself reacting just as strongly when I hear it from others. Others who actually have perhaps more of a right to define it than I do - veterans, veterans of Vietnam, veterans of previous wars - to be specific. 'Wasted Lives', I realize isn't intended to say the individual's life was a waste - rather that their lives were spent and cut short in an unnecessary war. But, I still contend, that the families whose lives have to go on, can hardly be comforted by the use of words 'wasted lives' .

I contend that great care be given in choice and use of words to describe those whose lives have been cut short as other than 'wasted lives' for their lives mattered and even if this Administration, in it's callous disregard, does not believe that to be so - those lives mattered and deserve honoring, memorializing, rememberance as the individual lives they lived. Not some category catch phrase to promote a viewpoint as to the value of the war of the moment - be it Vietnam, where my young husband was deployed and could have become one of 'those wasted lives' or Iraq, where my son-in-law and nephew could still become one of 'those wasted lives'...... how dare people reference our loved ones lives as 'wasted lives' and how lazy not to find more appropriate language to make a more clear description of opposition to a war.

Among some of the peace activist people with which I find myself in what is frequently an uneasy collaboration, I am sometimes startled by what feels like 'coarse' choice of descriptive words to further perhaps their message even at the expense of my message - which is often times, as a military family, not the same as their message. And, I also do find, among some of the peace activist groups, some people among them are not so peaceful and more interested in activism at all costs. even if it runs roughshod over the very people who carry the weight of this war on their shoulders and live it daily - troops and military families who love and support them. Even when their words indicate support for the families and troops, their message and actions convey otherwise. I don't like leaving it to peace activists or politicians to frame on my behalf my message, and I find treasure in the people willing to listen, adjust word useage and language.

Usage of the words wasted lives' to describe a war initiated and sustained by politicians -- yes, it's a big deal to me.

Apologies accepted Barack Obama

quoting from article;

He told reporters that even as the words came out he knew he had misspoken.

"It is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any (military families) felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they'd shown."

and in a round about way, I guess a thank you could be in order for accidentally creating a forum of discussion which is part of the dialogue on Iraq war. Now, if you will kindly Vote the Power of the Purse ..... bring them home, it would be even more meaningful ... to me.

Debate on Iraq Doesn't Hurt Morale, Leaders Say

...they both said it debate over President Bush's new plan for Iraq will not undercut troop morale ...

According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congressional debate over President Bush's new plan for Iraq will not undercut troop morale. The two testified before the Armed Services Committee in the House, which will debate the issue next week.

NPR - All Things Considered, February 7, 2007
NPR : Debate on Iraq Doesn't Hurt Morale, Leaders Say

(my note; well geesh, it's only four years later and about time or past time to be 'having healthy debate/dialogue' about Iraq invasion/occupation without it having to mean it is hurting troop morale! About time the military leaders stated clearly the troops can handle the truth - they are far from shrinking violets, after all)