The hidden cost of Bush's war

Concern about fatalities among Western forces in Iraq tends to overlook another ghastly statistic: the spectacularly mounting toll of the severely wounded. Andrew Buncombe reports on America's invisible army of maimed and crippled servicemen

14 November 2003

It has been three months since Sergeant Mike Meinen lost his right leg in Iraq and just two weeks since he received a new one. He is still getting used to the prosthetic, still adjusting to its feel, the way it looks, the way in which his injury has changed his life for ever. Remarkably, he refuses to be bitter ­ either about the Iraqi guerrillas who maimed him or about the people in Washington who sent him to war.

"I can't be upset for what has happened. We went to Iraq for a reason, there were obviously going to be casualties," said 24-year-old Sgt Meinen, father of a five-month-old daughter, Abigail, who was born when he was in Iraq. "I can't be upset that I was among them... I am proud of what I have done."

Sgt Meinen, of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company, 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, is among thousands of wounded soldiers who have returned from Iraq to uncertain futures, months of difficult and often painful treatment and an American public largely unaware that so many troops are being injured every day. The reality is that, just as Iraqi hospitals struggled to deal with the number of wounded civilians during the invasion of the country, so military hospitals in the US are now overflowing with wounded Americans.

Advances in body armour and battlefield medicine mean that an increasing number of soldiers such as Sgt Meinen are surviving injuries that even just a decade ago would have killed them. As a result, while the Bush administration is able to point to a relatively modest number of US fatalities in Iraq ­ yesterday the total stood at 396 ­ there is a huge number of severely wounded soldiers whose injuries and fate go largely unreported. Mr Bush has ordered that the media should not be allowed to photograph coffins containing the bodies of those killed in Iraq, and the return of injured US troops also goes largely unpublicised. This is no coincidence. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont told the Senate last month: "The wounded are brought back after midnight, making sure the press does not see the planes coming in with the wounded."

more