I've tried to copy a few excerpts from this incredibly moving and horrifying article about our soldiers wounded in Iraq, but honestly, I can't do the story justice. Read this entire thing, then go to the Web page and copy THE ENTIRE STORY and email it to all of your friends. This is horrifying. And it's the face of what's to come if we re-elect George Bush.
At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives.
They're the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq....
They're convinced U.S. soldiers will be fighting, dying and getting maimed in Iraq for many years to come....
Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.
"I'm here for him — nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."
He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."
Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.
He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.
"It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."
"If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally." ....
In another room, 23-year-old Mark Romero from the army's Third Brigade is also nursing a broken arm. A mechanic who served 11 months in Iraq, he snapped a bone trying to stop a 230 kilogram metal door from falling on a fellow soldier.
Lodged in his back is a piece of shrapnel from mortars that rained through the roof of the gym at the U.S. base in Mosul, northern Iraq, while Romero was working out.
He says the question constantly asked by soldiers is: "What are we doing there?"....
If Americans understood what was really going on in Iraq, they'd pressure Bush to be clearer about "why we're really fighting," he says.
"The war on terror wasn't in Iraq till we went there," he says. "We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in."
As a soldier, he describes himself as "almost a political prisoner" in the sense that he can't express himself on whether he believes U.S. soldiers should stay in Iraq.
But his 33-year-old wife, Cheryl, has no qualms about speaking her mind.
"The army is not going to like what I have to say, but I think we have no business being there," she says about Iraq.
She too comes from a family with a long military tradition and works as a civilian at her husband's military base in Texas. She voted for Bush in 2000, but now says Democratic challenger John Kerry will get her support.
"I will definitely vote for Kerry, not because I prefer Kerry over Bush but because I don't want Bush back in office. I'm hoping that if Kerry takes office, we'll be pulling out" of Iraq, she says.
Cheryl believes Bush misled the country to war, arguing he diverted resources from far greater threats to U.S. interests, including the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Asked why Bush launched the war, she says: "I think he wanted to fill his dad's shoes. I think he felt he had something to prove."
If the point of the war was to remove Saddam from power, then Bush's father, former president George Bush, should have done so in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which Daniels also fought.
Increasing Cheryl's anger is the fact the army did little to help her contact her wounded husband.
She paid for her flight to Germany, and is staying at the Fisher House, a privately funded agency that offers virtually free accommodation in Landstuhl to the families of injured soldiers.
Infuriated by what she sees as a misleading president, an unnecessary war and a heartless military, Cheryl vows to break the Daniels' family tradition of serving their country. Her 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are already talking of enlisting one day, but Cheryl won't hear of it.
"We've paid our dues," she says.
