The
Human Cost of War: Mark Benjamin on Casualties
According
to UPI investigations editor Mark Benjamin’s latest
report, the number of U.S. medical evacuations from Iraq has
passed 18,000.
“Most of the casualties in any conflict are not necessarily people who
are struck by the enemies bullets,” Benjamin tells me. “They’re
people who are in car accidents, people who blow out their shoulders or knees,
people who get very sick, people who have a variety of ailments that have to
be removed from combat. They push themselves hard. They work 18-20 hours a day.
They drive thousands of miles and lift heavy items. They take, what some people
would consider, dangerous vaccines and drugs. There’s a whole list of reasons
why soldiers could get ill or injured in combat besides getting hit by the enemy.
Understanding that human cost of war is an important part of reporting on a conflict.”
Mike
Kaspar and I phoned Benjamin from the KUCI studios at the University
of California at Irvine, where our radio show Weekly
Signals originates. Benjamin won the 2004
Fourth Estate Award, the American Legion's top journalism honor,
for his reporting last October on the conditions at Fort
Stewart, Georgia where more than 600 sick, wounded and injured
soldiers, many of whom served in Iraq, were held in hot cement barracks
without running water while they waited, sometimes for months, for
medical care.
“Most
of the people who were at Fort Stewart would say the situation was
pretty dire," Benjamin says. "Basically, the Fort Stewart
medical authorities were overwhelmed by the number of troops being
deployed in and out of Operation Iraqi Freedom, plus an influx of
National Guard and Army Reserve troops — which represent an
increasing percentage of the troops fighting in this war. The Fort
Stewart authorities, I would say, “warehoused” the soldiers.
This is in Georgia. It was very very hot during the summer. It was
hot when I was there in October. There was no running water or bathrooms
in the buildings. I met a soldier with a crushed foot who had been
waiting months and months to get medical treatment. It was a very
serious situation. The Pentagon and Congress acted pretty aggressively
in reaction
to that story.”
What
with all the new sick and injured, is there a lesson we can learn
from Fort Stewart?
“The
Pentagon and the military have gotten very good at acute warfare
injuries,” Benjamin says. “In other words, if you’re
injured by an improvised explosive device in Baghdad and you lose
a leg, the Pentagon will move very quickly. The battlefield medics
are extremely good at what they do. They’re very fast. They
move people out of Iraq and to Landstuhl,
Germany or to Walter Reed
Army Medical Center here in Washington after Landstuhl, very
quickly.”
Benjamin
pauses and takes a deep breath. “However,” he says (and
it’s a long exhaled however), "those are not
the majority of people who are getting injured in this war. A very
small percentage of acutely wounded people go to Landstuhl or Walter
Reed, where the President visits. The large majority, thousands
and thousands of soldiers, are returned to Fort Bragg. They’re
returned to Fort Stewart. They’re returned to Fort Knox. They’re
returned to Fort Carson. The situation at those bases and the medical
care at those bases is much, much worse. I feel quite confident in
saying that my reporting shows that in many cases the medical care
at those bases ranges from poor to horrible. Soldiers are waiting
a long time for appointments. They do not feel that they are getting
good medical care. They don’t feel that people are watching
their medication. In many cases, they don’t feel that anybody
is taking care of them. The living conditions are in general much
better than what I saw at Fort Stewart, but the medical care, often
is not.
"So,
there are two lines of soldiers. When you turn on your TV, the president
is at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The care there is quite good
by all accounts. It's these thousands and thousands and thousands
of other soldiers who are out of the limelight that are getting the
short end of the stick.”
Why
is our government and armed forces treating its sick and wounded
this way?
“I
would say this," Benjamin says. "My reporting shows an
extreme attention to cost throughout the pipeline of soldier care.
Essentially, once you get to Landstuhl and from then on out — soldiers
are evacuated from Iraq to Landstuhl Germany, generally, and then
either to their home bases or to Walter Reed — there does seem
to be an amazing amount of attention paid to how much it costs to
treat soldiers."
Is
that why the care is so poor?
"I
don’t know," Benjamin says, "but the two certainly
seem to be occurring at the same time. There does seem to be a sad
history of not caring adequately for, what a lot of people would
call, our American heroes. Whether you support the war or not, these
are professionals who take their jobs very seriously and do it, generally,
very well. I think most American people would agree that they deserve
better.”
How
did you get your lead to the Fort Stewart story?
“The
chain of command at Fort Stewart did not know I was there, " Benjamin
says. "I was there at the invitation of soldiers who had served
in Operation Iraqi Freedom and felt that they had exhausted all of
their effort to rectify their situation with the chain of command.
"In
general, by the time a soldier comes to the press, they’re
at the end of their rope. They have tried to go to the Inspector
General. They have tried to go up the chain of command. They have
tried to go to their member of Congress. And they really are desperate.
"I
was at Fort Stewart at the invitation of those troops. I would add
that the Pentagon did not like that. In fact two weeks later, I wrote
a story about similar conditions that occurred at Fort
Knox. When I was with the soldiers at Fort Knox who were showing
me around, the chain of command was driving around in cars trying
to find me. They did find my photographer and detained him. They
didn’t release my photographer until after a call from a US
Senator who was following my work very closely. In general, the reaction
from the Pentagon to these types of articles has been extremely hostile.”
It
seems that the military is very concerned with images — the
filming of sick and wounded and especially images of the dead coming
home in flagged-draped coffins is taboo. How does the press feel
about this censorship?
“The
media is not allowed to take still photos or any kind of images of
the coffins coming off the planes at Dover Air Force Base,” Benjamin
says. “And I think there is a certain amount of censorship
going on, both inside the media and outside the media. Yes, we in
the media have now been barred from filming Dover, which a lot of
reporters and editors think is unfair. There’s also been some
censorship in the media itself. For example, we had that horrible
situation the other week in Fallujah where
the bodies of some American civilians were burned and mutilated and
hanged. You could argue all day about this, but I think — and
I think some editors I know would say — ‘that’s
war… welcome to the show.’ I think, in general it’s
best for the media to err on the side of disclosing every bit of
it. Even though some of it may be extremely unpleasant.”
Has
the military given a reason for the censorship at Dover?
“I
don’t know whether or not they’ve given a reason,” Benjamin
says, “but I can’t imagine what that reason would be
other than they don’t want us to see the coffins
coming back from Iraq.”
In
an earlier
report filed by Benjamin, he interviewed Steve Robinson, the
executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. Robinson
voiced concern about the “psychological and neurological evacuations” from
the war in Iraq. So, I ask Benjamin about the controversial anti-malaria
drug Lariam which has a record of
complications.
“Lariam is
a drug that was invented by the army — the Walter Reed Institute
of Research," Benjamin says. “It passes the blood brain
barrier and in some percentage of users appears to have some very
serious side effects. For example, the food and drug administration
now says on Lariam’s
label that it can cause psychosis, aggression, paranoia, thoughts
of suicide and delusions. There is concern that the Pentagon has
used it very widely in Afghanistan and very widely in Iraq. This
is interesting because you don’t need to use Lariam with the
type of malaria that’s in Iraq.”
What
is the military doing about this situation?
“The
Pentagon recently announced that it’s going to do a study.
It will take up to two years to find out what the impact is on the
health of the soldiers who have taken this drug. And just this week
the Veterans’ Administration announced that it separately will
began looking at the health and mental capacity of soldiers who have
taken this drug to find out whether, frankly, it may be driving soldiers
crazy and potentially to suicide. I would add that at the same time,
the Pentagon is looking at a cluster of what is now 24
soldiers who have apparently committed suicide on the ground
in Iraq and Kuwait in 2003. The Pentagon is saying that a very small
percentage of those soldiers — possibly 4% — have taken
Lariam. To be completely frank, I’m not convinced they’re
right about that, so that story is still developing.”
How
many soldiers overall have taken the drug?
“Just
about all the soldiers in Afghanistan have at one time or another
taken Lariam,” Benjamin says. “There are somewhere between
7,000 and 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at any given time. Iraq,
of course is a different ball of wax — 130,000 soldiers on
the ground. The Pentagon has said a number of different things depending
on when you ask them about how many soldiers have taken Lariam in
Iraq. They have said almost none. They have said 45,000. They have
said 80.000. I have been to Fort Stewart, Fort Knox, Fort Benning,
Fort Bragg, Landstuhl, Walter Reed and Fort Carson. There certainly
are a lot of soldiers around saying that they took the drug and a
surprising number who are saying they are having mental problems
because of it. Now, that’s not a scientific study. But, the
anecdotal evidence would indicate that it’s not almost none
who have taken Lariam.”
Is
there any profit motive behind the military’s use of Lariam?
“Not
as far as I can tell. The company that profits primarily from the
manufacturing of Lariam is
its producer La Roche,
a very large Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer,” Benjamin says. “After
the drug was invented by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research,
they licensed it to La Roche. La Roche sells it back to the Army."
Are
there any other major reports of Lariam complications?
“The
Army isn’t the only group that has had problems with Lariam.
The Peace Corps has used it in West Africa for almost a decade and
there are many Peace
Corps Volunteers who have said they had serious problems with
this drug.”
“There’s
an interesting little twist to the Lariam story that goes like this:
Lariam is one of only three drugs that you can take to prevent very
aggressive forms of malaria. The most aggressive form of malaria
is resistant to Chloroquine — a
drug that’s been around since Vietnam that prevents malaria.
If you’re dealing with Chloroquine-resistant malaria you have
to either take Lariam or daily pills of Doxycycline which is an antibiotic.
There is also a new drug called Malarone.
The Pentagon appears to have deployed soldiers to Iraq and told them
to take Lariam — again
we don’t know how many, somewhere between zero and 80,000.
What’s interesting is that there is zero, as far as I could
tell, or very very very little Chloroquine-resistant malaria in Iraq
at all.”
Did
the Pentagon need to use Lariam at all in Iraq?
“The
Pentagon said, as of February 25 in testimony before Congress, that
they were no longer going to use Lariam because they had discovered
that there is no Chloroquine-resistant malaria in Iraq. So they didn’t
need to use it," Benjamin says. "That’s interesting
because before the war in Iraq started, I looked at the Center
for Disease Control's website and it very clearly stated that
in Iraq there was no Chloroquine-resistant malaria. It says it to
this day. My reporting seems to show that either the Pentagon didn’t
call the CDC or look at the CDC’s website, or they just screwed
up.”
— Nathan Callahan,
April 14, 2004
|
