5/9/08: 'Supporting our troops' is more than a slogan

I do not have a “support our troops” sticker or magnet on my car. I never have, and I never will.
I have a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that I have never supported the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I realize that supporting the war and supporting the soldiers we send into it are two separate things but to this I say that putting a magnet on my car and actually actively supporting the soldiers are also two separate things.

Thus my main reason for not having a sticker — we need to stop saying we support the troops and actually do it.

We’ve had a lot of talk about supporting the troops, most of which is limited to sincerely thanking them for their sacrifice.

The word “sacrifice” implies that something has been freely given, offered on our behalf by strong and self-sustained individuals and, for the most part, the word accurately describes what soldiers in the Iraq, Afghanistan and other past wars have done. They have sacrificed.

But the word has become a euphemism for what our soldiers have really done.

It covers over the reality of the physical and emotional wounds they’ve sustained in battle.

It covers over the reality of wounds they have caused in the name of our country and how knowing they caused those wounds affects their lives after the war. Solemnly thanking them and their families, then sending them back to their homes has come to stand in for providing the support that they — that anyone, having made these kinds of sacrifices — need after being at war.

Thanking soldiers for their sacrifice has become a way for us to shirk our responsibilities to them.

It should not be “their sacrifice.” It needs to be “our sacrifice.” We sent them. In doing so, we have made ourselves responsible for them. And we have failed them.

We sent the “surge” of troops that was to win us the war in Iraq while we reduced funding for veterans and planned to collapse Bethesda Naval Hospital and Walter Reed National Army Medical Center into one facility. We seem unconcerned with providing for even the physical rehabilitation of wounded soldiers — this in a war with relatively low mortality, but more terrible injuries than ever.

Dr. Atul Gawande, in his book “Better,” writes about the dramatic drop in mortality rates in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which had gone down to 10 percent — from the 24 percent mortality of Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War — thanks to doctors’ focus on perfecting existing in-the-field triage and surgical techniques. On-site surgeons traveling with the troops have been able to save more wounded soldiers by getting to them more quickly and immediately sending them on to better-equipped facilities once the most severe wounds have been controlled.

More people surviving war is a good outcome and one we should be happy with. Certainly those whose family members have gone to war and returned, in whatever condition, are grateful to have their loved ones back.

But as Dr. Gawande points out, the quality of life for the soldiers now returning to the States, some with injuries that would have been “unsurvivable in previous wars,” is still “an open question.”

“We have never faced having to rehabilitate people with such extensive wounds. We are only beginning to learn what to do to make a life worth living possible for them,” Dr. Gawande says.

It’s our job, as people who “support our troops,” to find out what can be done — and do it.