At first, the idea of stationing military drill instructors at Walter Reed Hospital looks to be a deployment snafu.

But it’s not.

Drill instructors are now yelling at bed-ridden victims of the Iraq war in a strategy that’s supposed to help the injured veterans regain their health and get back into the action.

It’s that desperate.

Imagine. There is such a dearth of people willing to sign up and go to Iraq that the military now has to bribe recruits with $20,000 bonuses if they sign up right away and consent to being deployed immediately into the battlefields of Baghdad.

So the military decided that sending in drill instructors and hard core army rangers (who I might add are the toughest fighting force of all the special teams in the military) to rouse the brain injured, half blind, missing limb patients at Walter Reed would encourage the injured to heal quickly so they could return to the ruinous fields of combat.

And they wanted discipline among the injured. One story that squirmed out of this debacle had a drill instructor demanding that an injured man who was missing the bottom half of his right leg lay in his bed at a position of attention when he was being addressed by the sergeant. There was even a demand that patients, some missing their hands and arms, salute officers who might stop by to check on their readiness to return to battle.

This inane idea evolved to include an e-mail sent by another team leader that demanded that all patients
attend formations at 7:30 in the morning. “No exceptions,” screamed the e-mail in capital letters.

There are troops whose injuries are so severe they may not even be able to read or ever get out of bed again. And yet they were expected to be there at the formation, no matter if they were completely immobilized. It was up to them to inform orderlies or nurses to get them to these formations otherwise they could be demoted and lose whatever piddling amount of money their pay grade afforded them.

If these preposterous measures by a military apparently dumbed down by an all volunteer force of half wits doesn’t make you want to hit the bricks and put a stop to it, then you’re just as much a part of the problem as are the primates who have the gall to yell at injured quadriplegics and half deaf, half blind human beings who will be in that condition for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps someone in command will realize that instead of yelling at these barely alive human beings they figure out a way to use their bloated budgets to care for those who will have to live with this debacle created by a man who ran away from serving his country after he signed up.

Maybe the drill instructors could be deployed just down the road to the Oval Office instead. And yell at the man sitting behind that desk to get up off his arrogant ass and do the right thing for the troops and the nation he pretends to serve.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Stuff I know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.