Support our private contractors

By Nancy Jane Moore

Juan Cole included a bit of information I didn't know today on Informed Comment: 800 civilian contractors performing military-related jobs in Iraq have been killed and more than 3,300 have been injured.

The news comes from an AP report (published in Time online among other places) that also points out the U.S. has almost as many contractors as soldiers in Iraq -- 120,000 contractors and 135,000 soldiers. (Our government seems to be outsourcing everything.) Noting that insurgents make no distinction between contractors and soldiers when attacking U.S. personnel, the AP went out to say:

But when contractors are killed or wounded, the casualties are off the books, in a sense. While the Defense Department issues a press release whenever a soldier or Marine dies, the AP had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain figures on pre-2006 civilian deaths and injuries from the Labor Department, which tracks workers' compensation claims.

If the contractor deaths and injuries are included in the statistics from Iraq, it increases the overall casualty rate by about 25 percent.

Of course, the contractors are paid much better than soldiers for putting their lives on the line: The AP says they can make $100,000 a year, most of it tax free. (Somebody please explain to me exactly how it saves taxpayers' money to contract out military services to private companies who pay their workers six times what soldiers are paid -- especially when one assumes the private firms are also earning a tidy profit.)

The AP doesn't say if the private companies also provide high level workers' compensation and disability coverage for their workers -- even with high pay that's not a given -- but I wouldn't be surprised to find that contractors who've suffered traumatic brain injuries and multiple amputations are getting better care than the wounded soldiers being treated at Walter Reed.

Speaking of Walter Reed, I heard Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the radio this morning sounding like Captain Renault from the movie Casablanca: He was "shocked, shocked" to find that wounded soldiers were being treated so badly.

I find it hard to believe that problems of this magnitude -- particularly the difficulties in getting decent disability ratings -- were so well covered up that the only way higher ups in the Pentagon found out about them was by reading The Washington Post. In the first place, The Post isn't even the first publication to cover the way wounded soldiers are being treated -- Mark Benjamin on Salon.com reported specifically on the problems of those with brain injuries more than a year ago.

And I doubt that these problems were any big secret among staff at Walter Reed. In fact, I suspect there were dedicated workers who tried to do their best by the wounded and to report problems -- and I also suspect no one paid any attention to them.

It's a shame that embarrassing coverage in The Washington Post is about the only thing that makes some people do their jobs properly.

Support our troops -- Catch-22

By Nancy Jane Moore

The only thing everyone in the U.S. seems to agree on when it comes to the war in Iraq is the need to support our troops.

So why aren't we doing it?

Today's New York Times has an article on the toll that repeat deployments are taking on our troops -- especially the reserves and guard units, who had every reason to assume that they wouldn't be called up for such extensive combat duty except to the defend the country against an immediate and grave danger. (Despite the rhetoric Cheney is throwing around, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with defending the U.S.)

And that's just the troops who are coming home more or less in one piece. The wounded are suffering a great deal more. A two-part series by Dana Priest and Anne Hull in The Washington Post on how the wounded are being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital points out that many of the seriously wounded are not getting the support and treatment they need. Even worse, the military is trying to keep their disability payments to a minimum. Given that a lot of these wounded soldiers suffered brain injuries, it's hard for them to fight the entrenched military bureaucracy.

The Post article also pointed out that a lot of these wounded veterans are living in substandard conditions in old buildings on the Walter Reed campus. Interestingly, the Army immediately latched onto the problems with mold and vermin. Dana Milbank writes in Friday's Post online:

It's not every day one gets to witness a whitewash in action, but Walter Reed Army Medical Center provided just such an opportunity yesterday.

Milbank gives the entertaining details of people scurrying around to -- literally -- slap whitewash on moldy walls, and then observes:

The general also seemed to miss a larger point identified by other officials: Walter Reed's problem isn't of mice and mold but a bureaucracy that has impeded the recovery of wounded soldiers.

This is supporting our troops?

Our treatment of wounded soldiers is particularly important, because we have so many of them -- one source puts U.S. wounded at over 23,000. That's the thing about this war: More wounded soldiers make it out alive. A report on Science Daily back in 2005 says that only 10 percent of those wounded in combat are dying in Iraq -- as opposed to 24 percent in Vietnam and 30 percent in World War II. The article goes on to point out:

But that's not entirely good news for the survivors. Injuries from suicide bombs and land mines often leave lifetime disabilities. Surgeons report a depressingly high incidence of blindness. Amputations, seen almost weekly on television, raise distressing questions about how survivors and their families will adapt and function.

And as The Post article made clear, the military isn't doing much to help these survivors and their families adapt and function.

Support our troops? Sure, as long as all we're spending is rhetoric.

A couple of days after The Post articles came out, I heard Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, chief of the Army Medical Command, interviewed on NPR's Diane Rehm Show. He said something in passing that caught my ear -- one reason some work didn't get done in a timely manner at Walter Reed was because it was being transferred over to private contractors. Sounds like yet another example of this administration's penchant for making sure the private sector can make a profit on government work -- whether it gets done right or not.

But the real key here is that we have a bureaucracy -- in the government, in the military, and in the private contractors handling their functions -- that really isn't interested in making sure our soldiers get the care they need. Perhaps they're just trying to keep our costs down by making sure the wounded don't get the disability payments they need. Or perhaps it's only that -- like many bureaucrats -- they see their job as getting a piece of paper off their desks, rather than making sure people get what they're entitled to.

This is the same kind of incompetence and indifference we saw from the government after Hurricane Katrina. (If you want a recent account of how things are in New Orleans these days, I recommend this post on Erin Solaro's Civic Feminism blog.)

It's the same sort of bureaucratic failure that we see in so many public schools -- a recent article in The Washington Post Magazine about a teaching fellow's experience as a special ed teacher in D.C. is just one of thousands of examples of how the schools aren't giving children what they need.

But what can we expect from a country that can't be bothered to take care of its wounded soldiers?