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The invisible wounded
Injured soldiers evacuated to the U.S. never arrive in the light of
day -- and the Pentagon has yet to offer a satisfactory explanation
why.

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By Mark Benjamin

March 8, 2005 | In January 2000, then Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
Gen. Henry Shelton told an audience at Harvard that before committing
troops, politicians should make sure a war can pass what he called the
"Dover test," so named for the Air Force base in Delaware where fallen
soldiers' coffins return. Shelton said politicians must weigh military
actions against whether the public is "prepared for the sight of our
most precious resource coming home in flag-draped caskets."

It's widely known that on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the
Bush administration moved to defy the math and enforced a ban on
photographs of the caskets arriving at Dover, or at any other military
bases. But few realize that it seems to be pursuing the same strategy
with the wounded, who are far more numerous. Since 9/11, the
Pentagon's Transportation Command has medevaced 24,772 patients from
battlefields, mostly from Iraq. But two years after the invasion of
Iraq, images of wounded troops arriving in the United States are
almost as hard to find as pictures of caskets from Dover. That's
because all the transport is done literally in the dark, and in most
cases, photos are banned.

Ralph Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware
and a former CNN world affairs correspondent who has filed a suit to
force the Pentagon to release photographs and video of the caskets
arriving at Dover, said news images of wounded American soldiers have
been "extremely scarce." Wounded soldiers, like caskets, mostly show
up in the news only after they arrive back in their hometowns.
Begleiter said the Pentagon has tried to minimize public access to
images and information that might drain Americans' tolerance for the
war. "I think the Pentagon is taking steps to minimize the exposure of
the costs of war," said Begleiter. "Of course they are."

A Salon investigation has found that flights carrying the wounded
arrive in the United States only at night. And the military is
hard-pressed to explain why. In a series of interviews, officials at
the Pentagon's Air Mobility Command, which manages all the
evacuations, refused to talk on the record to explain the nighttime
flights, or to clarify discrepancies in their off-the-record
explanations of why the flights arrive when they do. In a written
statement, the command said that "operational restrictions" at a
runway near the military's main hospital in Germany, where wounded
from Iraq are brought first, affect the timing of flights. The command
also attempted to explain the flight schedule by saying doctors in
Germany need plenty of time to stabilize patients before they fly to
the United States.

From Germany, the military flies the wounded into Andrews Air Force
Base in Maryland. Troops with some of the worst injuries are delivered
from there to the military's top hospitals nearby, Walter Reed Army
Medical Center in Washington and National Naval Medical Center in
Bethesda, Md. But both hospitals bar the press from seeing or
photographing incoming patients, ostensibly to protect their privacy.
Other patients flown from Germany are held at a medical staging
facility at Andrews until they are transported to other military
hospitals.

Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Operation Truth, an
advocacy group for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, said the
nighttime-only arrivals of wounded, along with the restrictions on
coffin photos and other P.R. tactics, are designed to hide from the
public the daily flow of wounded and dead. "They do it so nobody sees
[the wounded]," Rieckhoff said. "In their mind-set, this is going to
demoralize the American people. The overall cost of this war has been
… continuously hidden throughout. As the costs get higher, their
efforts to conceal those costs also increase."

But the Pentagon says it's not trying to hide the wounded from anyone.
(Pentagon officials have also denied that banning photographs of
coffins at Dover was a P.R. decision.) Capt. Herbert McConnell, a
spokesman for Andrews Air Force Base, said that while it's true the
flights of wounded arrive only at night, the schedule is not designed
to minimize images of wounded soldiers. "There is no conspiracy, I can
tell you that. I am absolutely sure there is no effort to bring them
in under the darkness of night," McConnell said. "There is nothing
shady going on here."

From Andrews, some of the most seriously wounded are driven to Walter
Reed or Bethesda Naval Medical Center in buses, ambulances or unmarked
black vans. Photos of the arrivals at the hospitals are prohibited.
(Salon obtained the images of wounded arriving at Walter Reed at night
despite the ban. The images do not show the identities of the
patients.)

Nearly 4,000 soldiers hurt in Iraq have been bused from Andrews Air
Force Base to Walter Reed, according to the hospital. Because the
planes come in late at Andrews, patients arrive at Walter Reed after
dark and after the hospital's clinics are closed. The wounded are
unloaded into hallways empty of the patients, families and media who
typically are present during the day. They are not unloaded into the
common entrance closest to the emergency room.

On one recent night at Walter Reed, about 10 hospital medical
officials wearing green camouflage lined up gurneys in the empty
hospital lobby just before 10. At around 9:45 p.m., someone announced
that the "buses are here," and staff began putting on light blue
rubber gloves. White school buses converted into ambulances and marked
"Walter Reed" pulled up. Two unmarked black vans did too. The convoy
did not go through the main circular drive to a covered entrance close
to the emergency room and pharmacy, where most patients go in and out.
The vehicles instead pulled into a raised drive above that entrance
and unloaded the wounded under the open, dark sky.

The medical officials slowly unloaded the wounded who were on
stretchers. Others entered in wheelchairs, hobbled in on crutches or
walked. Two soldiers brought in on wheeled gurneys were
swollen-looking, appeared unconscious and were fully intubated with
large ventilators strapped across their beds. A bag of what could have
been bloody urine hung off the side of one gurney.

The walking wounded were handed white bags from the Red Cross off a
cart outside. A handful of civilians came in at the same time and
walked solemnly through the empty hallways to the hospital's Family
Assistance Center with suitcases in tow. I witnessed two other
arrivals like that on cold winter nights. Soldiers I know at Walter
Reed have seen many more.

Walter Reed bars any media coverage of incoming wounded, ostensibly to
protect their privacy. But the photos obtained by Salon prove how easy
it is to photograph the arrival of patients at Walter Reed without
violating privacy rights.

Nothing I uncovered in my reporting ever suggested that troops with
serious physical wounds -- amputees or gunshot victims -- were getting
anything less than the care and attention they deserve. Indeed, the
Pentagon and Walter Reed have allowed reporters and photographers to
cover amputees recuperating at Walter Reed and Army doctors pulling
out all the stops to save critically wounded troops on the sandy
battlefields of Iraq. By all accounts, these are the things the Army
does well. They represent "good news" stories for the Pentagon,
showing the great lengths the military goes to care for downed
soldiers.

But reporting on the size, scope or mounting cost of the war -- like
pictures of incoming caskets or the seemingly endless stream of
stretchers arriving at Walter Reed -- is almost impossible because of
Pentagon restrictions.

In a strange twist, Andrews Air Force Base last month did let me
videotape a plane of wounded being unloaded in the dark. Andrews
officials said the press can watch the wounded arriving, but few
reporters ever ask to visit the acres of flat asphalt on the "flight
line" there. McConnell, the Andrews spokesman, said that allowing me
to videotape the wounded from a distance would let me "see there is no
conspiracy going on here."

With my military public affairs escort, I walked around half a mile
away from the passenger terminal at Andrews down the flight line.
While flight times seem to vary from evening until late at night, the
giant gray C-141 Starlifter from Germany that I saw landed just before
6 p.m. (an early arrival, according to my Army sources). Two white
buses marked "Walter Reed" backed up to the rear ramp of the plane,
followed later by two green buses marked with a red cross.

There was still some daylight when the Starlifter's wheels hit the
ground, but it was dark when soldiers carrying stretchers began to
descend from the plane. One by one, about 10 stretchers were slowly
carried down the ramp and loaded into racks in the buses. It was hard
to see the condition of the wounded. A soldier in a wheelchair
followed. Then came the walking wounded.

It's easy to imagine any number of reasons for taking off from Germany
late in the day, which, in turn, would result in evacuations arriving
in the United States at night. The flight from Germany in a C-141 can
take up to 10 hours, and there is a six-hour time difference with the
United States. The Air Mobility Command's off-the-record explanation
did not, however, account for the consistent arrivals of nighttime
flights. And its written response was vague: "Missions are scheduled
to depart [Germany] in compliance with airfield operational
restrictions, allowing patients a restful night before the long
trans-Atlantic flight, and giving medical personnel sufficient
processing time for those patients who may require special
handling/treatment."

John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense information
Web site, has spent a great deal of time trying to tease out the
difference between facts and Pentagon spin. He said it is odd that the
Pentagon hasn't done a good job of explaining the late-night flights.
"It is puzzling because there are perfectly sensible explanations for
this, but those are not the explanations being offered," Pike said.
"And the explanation being offered makes no sense. It makes no sense."

Pike and veterans' advocate Rieckhoff both said the Pentagon has
employed a raft of techniques to manage domestic perceptions of the
war. The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated
Terms defines "perception management" as "actions to convey and/or
deny selected information and indicators" to influence "emotions,
motives, and objective reasoning." Although the dictionary describes
such techniques only as they apply to foreign audiences, the Pentagon
has come under fire for employing some pretty aggressive techniques at
home, too.

President Bush himself has garnered some criticism for deciding not to
attend the funerals of fallen soldiers, opting for private meetings
with their families instead.

Some critics, including the American Legion, have blamed the Pentagon
for tinkering with even the most basic data on the war. Pentagon
"casualty reports," for example, only reflect troops hurt by the
bullets and bombs of the enemy -- excluding over 20,432 troops
evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries or illnesses the
Pentagon deems not caused directly by combat, like Humvee accidents or
mental trauma.

The Pentagon in 2002 closed its Office of Strategic Influence after
harsh criticism followed reports that the office intended to plant
fake news stories in the foreign press. Some press reports, however,
assert that the mission of the Office of Strategic Influence lives on
somewhere else in the Pentagon.

Last fall, military commanders in Iraq combined the public affairs and
psychological warfare offices there, according to the Los Angeles
Times. One office is supposed to get accurate information to the
public, the other to bedevil the enemy by using information as a
weapon. The decision to combine them prompted Gen. Richard Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to warn the joint chiefs in a
memo that "such organizational constructs have the potential to
compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public."
And in an obvious effort to control some of the news, the Pentagon now
has its own news channel. The Dish Network will soon carry the
Pentagon Channel, beaming its version of the truth to 11 million
viewers worldwide.

But the Pentagon's critics say it is not doing the American public any
favors by restricting and controlling images of war as it has.
Begleiter, the University of Delaware journalism professor, said the
American people deserve to get a clear picture of war, even when that
picture might be disturbing. "The American people have a right to see
what the military is doing in their name," he said.

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About the writer
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in
Washington, D.C.






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