Wounded in Iraq, Deserted at Home

More than thirty satellite trucks and nearly a hundred reporters hunkered down outside the Eagle County (Colorado) courthouse on Wednesday Aug. 6th waiting to get a glimpse of Los Angeles Laker basketball star Kobe Bryant entering the courtroom for a scheduled ten-minute appearance. Most of the major television networks and cable news and sports networks had reporters and camera crews at the scene.

Across the country, where plane loads of wounded soldiers are airlifted back to the states, unloaded at Andrews Air Force Base, and sent off to area hospitals, there are no hordes of television cameras recording these tragic trips off the tarmac.

In a summer marked by the media's focus on the Bryant sex case, the entrance of Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) into California's recall election, the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons and the hunt for their father, little attention has been paid to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and stuffed into wards at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the nation's biggest military hospital, and other facilities.

There are no pictures of wounded soldiers undergoing painful and protracted physical rehabilitation. There are no visuals of worried families waiting for news of their sons or daughters.

What is it about the wounded that makes us uncomfortable? Why have they been left out of the coverage of the war by the broadcast media?

"There have been no feature news stories on television focusing on the wounded," Liz Swasey, director of communications at the Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media watchdog group, told me in a telephone interview. "While there have been numerous reports of soldiers getting wounded, there have been no interviews from hospital bed sides," she pointed out. The Alexandria, Va.-based MRC, founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bezel III, monitors all major nationally televised and print news broadcasts and maintains "the nation's largest video news archive," Swasey said.

"The war was televised and sold as a sanitized war with minimal US casualties," said John Stauber, co-author of the recently released book, "The Weapons of Mass Deception," in an email exchange. "Showing wounded soldiers and interviewing their families could be disastrous PR for Bush's war. I suspect the administration is doing all it can to prevent such stories unless they are stage-managed feel-good events like Saving Private [Jessica] Lynch."

The glow from the jubilant celebrations over the speedy march to Baghdad has morphed into months of guerilla resistance. In the three months since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, U.S. casualties continue to mount: Since May 1, sixty-nine U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat, and deaths from other causes are more than double that figure.

As of Sept. 4, "Casualties in Iraq: The Human Cost of Occupation" -- a website affiliated with Antiwar.com -- listed the number of US combat deaths since the beginning of the U.S. invasion at 284, of which 184 are considered combat deaths. In addition to those killed in combat, dozens of other soldiers have died in accidents; a few have committed suicide; two are dead from a still-to-be-explained cluster of pneumonia cases; and several have died mysteriously in their sleep.

Another website, CNN.com's "Forces: U.S. & Coalition/Casualties", provides the names of coalition casualties -- whose families have been notified -- and includes pictures of the victims (when available), the soldier's ages, units, hometowns and an explanation of how each was killed.

While the dead are honored, the men and women injured in Iraq and/or Afghanistan have become the new disappeared. Once they've been swept off the battlefield and returned home, the broadcast media has essentially paid no attention to them. "Wounded troops are kept out of the media picture because they are perceived as a downer," said Norman Solomon, media critic, columnist and co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You."