Effects of the War in Iraq on the Troops

I heard a report this past week on the upcoming "Baghdad ER" documentary to be aired on HBO this Sunday (today). While I don't have cable, and hence won't be able to watch it until it comes out on DVD, I was very affected by this report on the broadcast.

It was a report on Democracy Now! The transcript is available here, but if you can, you should really listen to the story via a link on the same page. It includes not only an interview with the documentarian, John Alpert, but also with Dr. James Hill, a doctor who worked a grueling year in at the Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. Also interviewed was Paula Zwillinger, whose son, a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, was killed in Iraq in June of 2005.

The story was deeply moving. The audio of doctors slogging through amputation after amputation, death after death, and yes, sometimes winning some but always having to face the prospect of patients dying or irreparably damaged, got to me; as did the sadness of Paula Zwillinger having the opportunity to see, on film, after being contacted by Alpert, the last moments of her son's life when the doctors in the combat hospital could not save him. If you have a chance to watch the HBO documentary, do.

The other story I encountered was in the recent Rolling Stone Magazine. It was in the May 4 edition and it was entitled "The Hole Where Sgt. Thorne's Life Used to Be." This story covered the brain injury and attempts at recovery of a US Army Recon Scout who had a third of his head blown off in Iraq and still managed to survive. It's a tragic story that contains, almost as a side note, some disturbing information about the frequency of low-level cumulative brain injury of troops that goes undetected -- for now -- and allows for soldiers to be sent back into service ready to be re-injured once again. Apparently, these kinds of injuries, from proximity to explosions that knock troops down or out, but leave no immediate effects of concussion or other signs of damage, are more widespread than anyone, especially the Army, is willing to admit.

All of this gets me thinking about the troops in Iraq, what's to become of them, who really cares, and what the Left is doing about it now. I was in the Army at one time. I was in a combat arms unit, but it was not in a time of war, so, thankfully, I saw no combat and was never required to actually shoot at anyone. Nevertheless, I do know something about, and have first hand experience of, the military, how it works, and troop morale.

A cursory search of Google on the words "Iraq troop morale" for sites changed in the past 3 months returns precious little recent information on troop morale, but I can't imagine it can be good. The military tends to reflect the attitudes of the larger population and as Bush's approval ratings go down to sub-30% levels on his conduct of the war in Iraq, this has to be having an effect on the attitude of the average grunt concerning their commanders from the President on down.

According to a recent Zogby Poll "72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately." On the other hand, further reading of the poll results indicates some muddled thinking on the part of the forces serving:

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly to "retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks," 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."

Clearly, there's going to be hell to pay for commanders and for the Bush administration, as more and more troops realize, however slowly over time, that they have been sold a bill of goods as to the actual reasons for the invasion of Iraq and that the US is not pulling out any time soon, certainly not in the next year.

And what's the Left doing about this? I have found a few good things. Largely it seems to center around "bring the troops home" themes. See the Bring Them Home Now website, for example. But I can find scant little on Leftist concerns about the troops, their lives, how their families are affected, etc. This despite the fact that Cindy Sheehan seems to be in the news on almost a weekly basis. There is plenty about the families at Gold Star Families for Peace, but not much about the troops themselves.

Why is this? Could it have to do with the fact that most of the troops come from working class roots and the US Left has slowly yet increasingly divorced itself from the concerns of working class people over the course of the last four decades? This seems to me the main problem. Until the Left gets back to its working class roots, the problems of people like combat troops will be at best an abstraction, at worst, ignored.