Survivor

from, "War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq"

A state of war only serves as
an excuse for domestic tyranny
--Aleksandr Solshenitsyn

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage,
must in time be utterly lost
--Walt Whitman
_______________

The New York Times had a graphic article today on the new Army surgical manual, "War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007." It is "the first guidebook of new techniques for American battlefield surgeons to be published while the wars it analyzes are still being fought."

The book shows "gruesome photographs illustrat[ing] the grim nature of today’s wars, in which more are hurt by explosions than by bullets, and body armor leaves many alive but maimed." It is being issued at the same time as battlefield photographers are being disembedded from combat areas for depicting dead and wounded Americans (see Zoriah's story.)

The military tried "strenuously" to censor the book and keep it away from the general public; "they also tried to prevent the book from getting a copyright and the international standard book number letting it be sold commercially, co-author Dr. David Lounsbury said."

Censorship efforts were overruled by successive Army surgeons general. It can be ordered from the Government Printing Office for $71.

“I’m ashamed to say that there were folks even in the medical department who said, Over my dead body will American civilians see this,” said Dr. David E. Lounsbury, one of the book’s three authors. Dr. Lounsbury, 58, an internist and retired colonel, took part in the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq and was the editor of military medicine textbooks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“The average Joe Surgeon, civilian or military, has never seen this stuff,” Dr. Lounsbury said. “Yeah, they’ve seen guys shot in the chest. But the kind of ferocious blast, burn and penetrating trauma that’s part of the modern I.E.D. wound is like nothing they’ve seen, even in a Manhattan emergency room. It’s a shocking, heart-stopping, eye-opening kind of thing. And they need to see this on the plane before they get there, because there’s a learning curve to this.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general when the book was being prepared, said "some higher-ups in the military had been worried that the pictures 'could be spun politically to show the horrors of war.'" Imagine that.