 |
||||||
|
|
Media Room
Contact Eileen Parker, Personal Publicist, 763-533-6125, email, on short notice:
763-228-5494 Fully one-third of military personnel who have rotated through Afghanistan and Iraq may have traumatic brain injuries (TBI), for many unknown to them or their doctors. A large percentage of the troops who develop what is thought to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is 18-20% of 1.4 million troops, may actually have TBIs.
“The blast wave can kill, but more often, due to improved helmets and body armor, the soldier is injured with an invisible wound—a TBI, or traumatic brain injury. Because of this improved protection, the wounded now outnumber the dead by 16:1. Compare that to the 2.6:1 in Vietnam and the 2.4:1 in World War II and you have a gruesome success,” says Dr. Ronald J. Glasser, former Army doctor and author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq.
To date, over 3500 soldiers have died in Iraq – over 25,900 have been wounded. Almost half of the wounded have not returned to duty. The war in Iraq is demanding new medical practices to keep up with new kinds of injuries. More soldiers are surviving their initial wounds, thanks to body armor protecting their internal organs, but there are many instances of amputations and traumatic brain injuries (TBI). The real body count of this war does not exclude the wounded. The risk is not only death, but wounds doctors struggle to treat.
For most soldiers, the war doesn’t end with the playing of taps. The tens of thousands of wounded are rarely heard and as a result, they are not getting the help they need.
Wounded: Vietnam to
Iraq
Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq
365 Days “The stories I have tried to tell here are true,” says Glasser in his preface. “Those that happened in Japan I was part of; the rest are from the boys I met. I would have liked to have disbelieved some of them, and at first I did, but I was there long enough to hear the same stories again and again, and then to see part of it myself.” Assigned to Zama, an Army hospital in Japan, Glasser arrived there in September 1968 as a pediatrician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, primarily to care for the children of officers and high-ranking government officials. But with an average of six to eight thousand wounded per month, Glasser, along with all other available physicians, was called on to treat the soldiers. The death and suffering he witnessed were staggering. The soldiers counted their days by the length of their tour—one year, or 365 days—and they knew, down to the day, how much time they had left. Glasser tells their stories—their lives shockingly interrupted by the tragedies of war—with humane eloquence.
Ronald Glasser  |
|
||||
 |
||||||
