Friday, June 16, 2006

Stone Knives And Bearskins

Army admits a shortage
Acknowledges not all soldiers in combat have lifesaving bandages but pledges to increase supply

BY J. JIONI PALMER
Newsday Washington Bureau

June 16, 2006

WASHINGTON - After initially downplaying a shortage of the special anti-bleeding bandages available to troops in Iraq, a senior Army officer acknowledged yesterday that some soldiers are in combat without the potentially lifesaving field dressings.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes, director of force development, told a congressional panel that only medics and other lifesaving personnel were equipped with the essential clotting bandages, as suggested by the surgeon general of the Army. But other combat troops have been requesting them as well, and he said the Army is committed to supplying them quickly.
So lemme see...we send unarmored troops in unarmored Hummers into the field against an enemy that really isn't going to play "nice", partly because we aren't playing nice and respecting trivial little treaties like the Geneva Convention, and these troops get ambushed and shot at, and they end up shooting civilians, women and children, and we don't even get them the necessary tools to patch themselves up and head back out onto the battlefield?

My god, next war, let's just send them out with peashooters and slingshots. Why should this paragraph be factual in the 21st Century?
The lack of the bandages is especially pressing given that military officials say most troops who die in battle bleed to death before they reach hospital facilities, and that the bandages could curb the number of fatalities.
We reached the milestone of 2,500 dead American soldiers in Iraq. Let's take "most" at its most conservative and say 51% could have lived with these dressings. We would have cut our dead by 50%! Oh, but I forget, as King George II Edward the Longshanks says in "Braveheart":
Not the archers. My scouts tell me their archers are miles away and no threat to us. Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. Their dead cost nothing.