Frank Sandoval has been designated a casualty

Source: DoD

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Sgt. Frank M. Sandoval, 27, of Yuma, Ariz., died June 18 in Palo Alto, Calif., of wounds sustained when his unit was attacked by insurgents using small arms fire Nov. 28, 2005, in Tikrit, Iraq. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Artillery, Fort Sill, Okla.

Read more: http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11073

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Some of you may recall my posting Frank Sandoval's story last week, and that at that time he was not listed in the casualty reports. The DoD has a "Casualty Review Board" which decides on cases such as this, and has evidently confirmed that he "counts."

http://www.yumasun.com/news/sandoval_34933___article.html/family_yuma.html

http://www.insidebayarea.com/dailyreview/localnews/ci_6184600

that's where I learned it

They had posted him back at the time he died, then pulled it when DoD evidently said they needed to think about it.

I have been watching for this.

I put him on my homepage in the interim. I think I'll keep him there as well as on the June page; he is representative of the many stories of profoundly wounded and their struggles, that get even less press than the death counts.

It is harder to find such stories without a name from the DoD to start the search, but I think I will try to start a links page to articles like the San Jose Mercuy-News was running throughout his rehab.

Local press does a pretty good job in many cases - it just does not get picked up nationally.

I don't know what you're getting at here, but the DoD lists every soldier who dies of wounds sustained in theater as a casualty of OIF. Indeed, I challenge you to name one person who died of wounds sustained in theater that is not listed as an OIF casualty.

I cannot give you an example of one they turned down. I have found several examples where the decision came later, sometimes a lot later. Because of the way I search, I find the positive decisions. I am not on a "witch hunt" to find ones they reject; but I assume there would be some or why would there be a review board? And it may well be that if they do reject some, it is a valid decision. I fully expected this decision; my comment was just that it took eleven days for him to be officially acknowledged by the DoD and I was glad to see it.

Edit: I found one the other day wherein a suicide in Walter Reed was attributed to PTSD and listed as an official casualty of OIF.

I suspect they reject cases wherein somebody comes home and kills himself, and the family claims benefits on PTSD grounds or some such. You need a review board for these kinds of cases, and it merely signs off on documented theater-related injuries (where injuries excludes PTSD, as it has done historically, and I'm not commenting on the fairness of that). Since there are SO MANY cases of people dying outside of theater and being listed, even some many, many months later, there is no reasonable ground for asserting that some have died outside of theater and NOT been listed, if the death is directly attributable to injuries sustained in theater. The only border or fuzzy cases would be contraction of illness in theater, and I'd be interested to see how those are adjudicated.

If you're giving benefits, you must have a process (i.e., a review board). That's why it exists. Its existence, in other words, is not prima facie evidence that some who are injured in theater and die later are rejected.

and eleven days was not so long - it just seemed interminable, since I had been following his story

I have seen several listed who died in hospitals in the states - some WR or Bethesda, some local hospitals in Texas, Indiana, elsewhere. Frank is the first I have seen who had recovered so far - actually released from hospital - and died and was listed. But I have only been tracking in detail for nine months.

here is the PTSD case:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/29/AR2005052900918_pf.html


there have been cases of illness contracted in theatre counting - just last week a heatstroke victim died after evacuation to Germany and was counted. I don't know about longer-term illnesses.

they also count natural causes like heart attacks in theatre, traffic accidents, and suicides in theatre.

of course some of the "traffic accidents" are a humvee flipping over while driving insanely to avoid IEDs. They are listed as "non-hostile" which could be debated, in my opinion. One guy fell off a roof during a firefight and was listed as "non-hostile." I don't know whether that designation has any impact on benefits, so maybe it is meaningless, but somehow it seems wrong for the cause to imply it was other than in the course of actively conducting warfighting. Falling off a roof during a firefight is different from having a heart attack aboard ship.


And thanks for your reassurance as to the policy of the decisions - as I said, I have not tried to find the "rejects" - did not know whether sad stories were to be found there. There are enough stories of bureaucratic unfairness and mistreatment to suggest that there could well be. I will take your word for it that that is not the case. As I said, I don't have an agenda to chase that particular issue down a rabbit hole; I just want to honor those who have given all.

60 minutes story:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/19/60minutes/main656756.shtml


The accident recounted in the above resulted in two deaths and one injury; DoD announced the deaths, listed as non-hostile

DoD release of non-hostile Killed:

http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=8138

the injury is a quadriplegic

according to the 60 minutes article, he is, by the Pentagon’s definition, “non-combat injured.”

I have a good friend who has been a quadriplegic since VN era. Pneumonia is a constant threat. He's had some close calls.

if the soldier from the 60-minutes story were to die tomorrow of complications of his condition, would he be added to the numbers of non-hostile killed?

These get into rather thorny questions of the "directness" of causation. I don't know how the board would rule, but it would be a very difficult hearing, to be sure. But like I said, this is a kind of limit case owing to the extremely complex nature of quadriplegic injury, which produces a suspended state of "stabilization." In other words, even a death years later (as in, say, Christopher Reeves) can theoretically be directly related to the injury in theater, even if some extended period of "stabilization" has intervened.That makes such cases qualitatively different from other types of injuries. I'd be curious to see how review boards have ruled for such injuries in the past; the problem is that we have much better technology to maintain a stable state in quadriplegics than we've had in past wars, so the boards would essentially be dealing with a novel situation.