The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded 
Julian Borger, Washington
Monday August 4, 2003
The Guardian

US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media. 

Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112. 

The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. 

Unofficial figures are in the thousands. About half have been injured since the president's triumphant appearance on board the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln at the beginning of May. Many of the wounded have lost limbs. 

The figures are politically sensitive. The number of American combat deaths since the start of the war is 166 - 19 more than the death toll in the first Gulf war. 

The passing of that benchmark last month erased the perception, popular at the time Baghdad fell, that the US had scored an easy victory. 

According to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans still think Iraq was worth going to war over, but a quarter want the troops out now, and another third want a withdrawal if the casualty figures continue to mount. 

In fact, the total death toll this time is 248 - including accidents and suicides - and as the number of non-combat deaths and serious injuries becomes more widely known, the erosion of public confidence is likely to continue, posing a threat to Mr Bush's prospects of re-election, which at the beginning of May had seemed a foregone conclusion. 

Military observers say it is unusual, even in a "low-intensity" guerrilla war such as the situation seen in Iraq, for non-combat deaths to outnumber combat casualties. 

The Pentagon does not tabulate the cause of those deaths, but according to an American website that has been tracking official reports, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 23 American soldiers have died in car or helicopter accidents since May 1, while 12 have been killed in accidents with weapons or explosives. 

Three deaths have been categorised as "possible suicides", three have died from illness, and three from drowning. The rest are unexplained. 

Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown back to the US at a relentless rate, in twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force base near Washington. 

Hospital staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks, and the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington is so full that it has taken over beds normally reserved for cancer patients to handle the influx, according to a report on CBS television. 

Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical centre in Bethesda, new marine injuries are delivered almost daily by a medical plane known as the Nightingale. 

The Pentagon figure for "wounded in action" in Iraq is 827, but here again the total number of injuries appears to be much higher. 

The estimate given by central command in Qatar is 926, but according to Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base, that too is understated. 

"Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also," Col DeLane told National Public Radio. 

He said 90% of injuries were directly war-related. 

Some of that number may involve double-counting - if a soldier stays at the Andrews clinic on the way to Washington and then again on the way back to the war or back home, for example. But the actual number of wounded still appears to be much higher than the official figures. 

"When the facility where I'm at started absorbing the people coming back from theatre [in April], those numbers went up significantly - I'd say over 1,200," Col DeLane said. 

"That number even went up higher in the month of May, to about 1,500, and continues to increase." 

*****

NorthJersey.com

Uncle Sam shocks some veterans with recall to duty 
Sunday, August 3, 2003
By TOM DAVIS
STAFF WRITER 

Army Capt. Richard Hinman says he's a "draftee" serving in a volunteer army.

Think about it, says Hinman. The West Point graduate, who left the military in 1999, didn't want to go to Iraq and Kuwait. But he got his orders on Feb. 8 and was sent overseas in May.

"I wanted to get out of this kicking-in-doors-with-guns kind of thing," said Hinman, who was looking forward to more time with his two children but is now serving at Camp Doha, Kuwait. "It was a real surprise."

And a shock, Hinman said in a telephone interview from Kuwait, because he was so unprepared. Even his old uniforms had been thrown away.

Hinman is an Individual Ready Reservist, one of about 300,000 former service members available for active duty in a time of crisis, according to the Pentagon. Each year, as thousands of military personnel finish their terms of active duty, they are placed on IRR status for a period that varies according to agreements they signed when they joined the service. 

In some cases, a person on IRR status can be called up as many as 10 years after departure from the armed forces, the Pentagon says.

Although many people on IRR are never called back, the Department of Defense is relying on them more heavily as operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere stretch the military's manpower. And Hinman, who was enjoying civilian life, is returning to a life he had hoped to leave behind.

His wife, Josephine, who is living with her mother in Englewood Cliffs, had hoped so, too. 

She recalled the "horror" she felt when her husband approached, carrying a FedEx envelope, with the letter from the Army inside. She was on a treadmill, in a gym at the family's Falls Church, Va., apartment complex, while their 11-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter were playing with friends.

"There was no explanation. He just knew he had to report," his wife said. "I said, 'What do you mean you got called back up?' There were no warnings that he may be one of the people tasked to go."

Military officials were unable to say how many IRRs have been activated, why Hinman was selected, or how long his IRR status will last. But they said they were surprised to hear that Hinman didn't appear to know the terms of his own reserve obligations.

"For a West Point grad to say he didn't understand his commitment is highly unusual," said Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking, a Pentagon spokesman.

Unlike the more widely known and larger group of Selected Reservists - who train one weekend a month and two weeks each year and get paid for it - IRRs have almost no contact with the military. It's sort of an on-call list for inactive service men and women, and their call-up is typically seen as a last resort during hostilities.

While Selected Reservists - and also most members of the National Guard - train routinely, many do not have the same breadth of experience as IRRs, who are all veterans of active duty. Many IRRs have specialized skills.

And in this war, the Pentagon says, every reservist in Iraq has played an important role in the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and maintaining the dangerous peacekeeping operations there.

The 36-year-old Hinman, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1988, has served three months in Iraq and Kuwait. He said his current job is briefing military officials, orally and in writing, on the progress of strategic operations.

His wife says her husband is a good writer, but much to her dissatisfaction, the Pentagon won't further explain why he was selected over so many thousands of others who were training regularly.

And she's confused as she watches others return to the States while he expects to stay overseas until February 2004.

She becomes anxious as she watches television reports of soldiers dying nearly every day, even though he is now far from the action and not involved in the door-kicking he spoke of. She did note that in June he was in Baghdad.

"At what point are you free?" she asked. "When he committed to West Point at 17, did he know he could be called back the rest of his life?"

IRR terms do expire, but Lt. Col. Bob Stone, an Army Reserve spokesman, said that because the nation has been in a state of emergency since the Sept. 11 attacks, the military must maintain its access to experienced veterans during crises. 

That holds true in Iraq, where tensions remain high and it is time for some soldiers to return home. If someone doesn't understand that, Stone says, "they're probably not paying close enough attention."

The deployment of IRRs and the Inactive National Guard in war is nothing new, Stone said. Since the Selective Service System was eliminated 30 years ago, that "manpower pool" has become an important resource in a volunteer military, he said. In virtually every conflict since the Vietnam War, they have been called to duty, he said.

In Iraq, Stone said, the Marines even deployed some IRRs to serve in infantry units.

It is difficult to measure the enthusiasm or frustration level of the average IRR overseas. 

Surely there are members of the IRR who welcome the opportunity to serve again. Grateful for years of military pay and benefits and training, they are motivated by a loyalty to their former comrades and a sense of duty.

The Pentagon could not provide a list of those who have been called up.

Hinman put The Record in contact with Maj. Joseph Way, who was also an IRR activated in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Way said in a telephone interview from Louisiana that he was upset to find himself thousands of miles from home until he was permitted to return to be with his terminally ill wife.

"I was about to go freaking bananas," Way said about his time in the Middle East.

Hinman said he served in Panama in 1989, a year after graduating from West Point, leaving his wife alone for 13 months. Since then, she said, she has raised their two children largely on her own, since he has served months at a time in places such as Peru and the Persian Gulf. She was glad in 1999, when he decided to leave the Army and join the Secret Service. But in that job, there was more travel, and more time away from home.

"Even in the Secret Service, he did a five-month school away from us," his wife said. "In the presidential campaign, he went to the Democratic National Convention, he went to the Olympics, and he went with [vice presidential candidate Joseph] Lieberman to a dinner. It was like literally every weekend he was gone."

Last year, Hinman took a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, which staffs embassies and consulates around the world, and the family lived in Virginia. They were planning to move to India this month, and the children were enrolled in international schools for the coming academic year, she said.

They looked forward to India because the job would have allowed for the most family time they've ever had. Now that plan, like the rest of them, has been scrapped. 

"Our family are survivors, and we'll manage without him," Hinman's wife said. "But it's another year of not seeing his children. You only have 18 years of raising your children, and another year has gone by."

E-mail: davist@northjersey.com

*****

Father of dead soldier claims Army coverup 
By Mark Benjamin
Investigations Editor
8/7/2003

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- The father of a soldier who died of pneumonia this spring said Thursday the Army has excluded her death from its investigation of deadly pneumonia because it wants to cover up vaccine side effects.

"The government is covering this up and it is a dog-gone shame," said Moses Lacy, whose daughter, Army Spc. Rachael Lacy, died April 4 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., after getting pneumonia.

Lacy said his daughter "was a healthy young woman" but got ill within days of getting anthrax and smallpox vaccinations on March 2 in preparation for deployment to the Persian Gulf. She was too ill to ever be deployed.

The Army said 100 soldiers have gotten pneumonia in Iraq and southwestern Asia, two of those have died and another 13 have had to be put on respirators.

"The common denominator is smallpox and anthrax vaccinations," Moses Lacy said in a telephone interview from his home in Lynwood, Ill. "These young people have given their lives to the military and they are getting a raw deal. The Department of Defense is closing their eyes."

The Army did not mention vaccines on Tuesday when it held a press conference on the pneumonia investigation. Officials said the pneumonia does not appear to be contagious, and are close to ruling out biological or chemical warfare, SARS and Legionnaire's disease.

Col. Robert DeFraites of the Army Surgeon General's office said at the press conference that the Pentagon launched the investigation because of the severity of the pneumonia. "Are we seeing more cases in general than we might expect? Despite the harsh environment, the answer is no ... But again, we are still concerned about these severe ones."

DeFraites told UPI on Wednesday that the Pentagon would look into whether vaccines, among other factors, might have triggered the pneumonia cases. "Among all of the possible causes or contributing factors, we are looking at the immunizations that the soldiers received as well," DeFraites said. "It is premature to say that there is any relationship at all."

The Army said it is excluding Lacy's death from its investigation because Lacy never made it to Iraq or southwestern Asia where it says the cases are clustered. "She was never deployed to Iraq," Army Surgeon General spokeswoman Virginia Stephanakis told UPI Thursday. She said the military is participating in an investigation of Lacy's death separate from the pneumonia investigation. "It is a whole different issue."

Moses Lacy disagreed.

"She should be on that list (of deaths to investigate) because my daughter's first symptoms were pneumonia," Lacy said. "It happened immediately" after the vaccines, Moses said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. If I were a medical official it would be the first thing I would look into."

Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, told UPI, "We should include in this study any illnesses or deaths that appear to be pneumonia-related that occurred in theater or out of theater." 

Dr. Eric Pfeifer, the Minnesota coroner who performed Lacy's autopsy, told the Army Times that the smallpox and anthrax vaccines "may have" contributed to Lacy's death. "It's just very suspicious in my mind...that she's healthy, gets the vaccinations and then dies a couple weeks later." He listed "post-vaccine" problems on the death certificate.

Other members of the armed forces not in the Pentagon investigation say the anthrax vaccine has made them very sick with pneumonia-like symptoms. Michael Girard, a Senior Airman at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Fla., got his second anthrax shot on March 4. He developed flu-like symptoms - runny nose and a "heavy chest" - starting March 6 and by March 12 developed a rash on his left arm where he had gotten the shot.

"Then basically it started attacking my body, section by section," Girard said. He said he has since suffered bouts of vomiting up blood, pain in his feet that made them turn blue, chest pain, constipation, pain in his legs, headaches, stomach aches and extremely high blood pressure. In one weekend he went to the emergency room four times. He says he suffers from insomnia and fatigue.

At one point, he developed a horrible cough. "They did do a chest X-ray because they thought it might be pneumonia. A nurse told me that it was, but a doctor came in and said that it was not." 

Girard said Air Force doctors first suspected the anthrax vaccine caused his problems, but since have backed away from that diagnosis. "Everything that has been associated with this ever since I got sick has been like a coverup," Girard said. He said he "was perfectly 100 percent healthy" before getting the vaccine. "I was in the gym for an hour to two hours per day. I was running. I was energetic."

He said he was not scheduled to deploy anywhere.

In its pneumonia investigation, the Army is looking into the July 12 death of Army Spc. Joshua M. Neusche, 20, of Montreal, Mo. The Pentagon has described his death as "other causes." The Army is also looking at the June 17 death of Army Sgt. Michael L. Tosto, 24, of Apex, N.C. His death is listed as "illness."

Stephanakis said she was unfamiliar with the June 26 death in Kuwait of another soldier, Army Spc. Cory A. Hubbell, 20, of Urbana, Ill. His death is listed by the Pentagon under "breathing difficulties." Hubbell's mother, Connie Bickers, of Urbana, Ill., told the Champaign News-Gazette that the Army had not told her how her apparently healthy son died. "I wish I had answers, but I don't know if I'm ever going to get them," Bickers told the paper.

On Thursday, the Pentagon announced the death of Sgt. David L. Loyd, 44, of Jackson, Tenn. The announcement said Lloyd died on Aug. 5 when he "was on a mission when he experienced severe chest pains. The soldier was sent to the Kuwait hospital where he was pronounced dead."

A co-author of a government-sponsored study of possible side effects from the anthrax vaccine told UPI that the Army should look at whether that vaccine is behind the cluster of pneumonia cases. That study last year found the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia in two soldiers.

"As physicians, I would think they would be looking at all possible causes. I would think vaccines would be part of that," said Dr. John L. Sever of George Washington University Medical School, who was one of six authors of the study.

Last year's anthrax vaccine study, printed in the May 2002 issue of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, found that the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia among two soldiers, according to Sever. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services convened the group, called the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee, which studied 602 reports of possible reactions to the vaccine among nearly 400,000 troops who received it, Sever said.

In addition to identifying pneumonia and flu-like symptoms among troops who received the vaccine, the group also looked at four other cases of potentially serious reactions, including severe back pain and two soldiers who had sudden difficulty breathing in a possible allergic reaction to the vaccine.

Sever described the two cases of pneumonia as "wheezing and difficulty breathing going into a pneumonia-like picture."

To conduct the study, the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee examined reports from the U.S. military to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; they are anecdotal reports and do not necessarily show a cause-and-effect relationship.

Moses Lacy said he believes the real story is about vaccine side effects. "Unless somebody breaks this story wide open, we are going to have a lot more deaths. I am afraid we are going to lose a lot because of this vaccine."