Dad Wants To Know Why Most Powerful Military Failed To Provide Armor

[kpete]

Fatal Inaction

By April Witt
Sunday, June 18, 2006

The world's most powerful military failed to provide the armor that would have saved scores of American lives. One father would like to know why

Private 1st Class John Hart whispered into the phone so he wouldn't be overheard. It was just a matter of time, he said, before his buddies and he bumped down some back road in Iraq right into an ambush. They were so exposed, the somber young soldier told his dad, back home in Bedford, Mass. They were riding around in unarmored Humvees with canvas tops and gaping openings on the sides where doors should be. That seemed pretty stupid now that people were shooting at them and lobbing rockets. John, a 20-year-old gunner whose job it was to keep his head up and return fire, felt hung out in the breeze.

As John's father, Brian Hart, remembers the conversation, he listened with growing alarm, then stepped into his home office so his wife, Alma, wouldn't hear. It was October 11, 2003.

The Harts couldn't have been prouder of their only son for answering the president's call to fight the war against terror in Iraq. That very day, the Harts had accepted a contract to sell their clapboard house in historic Bedford, in part because they felt out of step with anti-war sentiments in town. Seven months earlier, on the eve of war, the congregation of First Parish Unitarian Church had unfurled a big blue banner emblazoned: "Speak Out For Peace." The Harts were offended. The banner loomed over the town common, hallowed ground where Bedford minutemen had gathered before the first battles of the Revolutionary War in nearby Lexington and Concord. The normally soft-spoken Brian Hart told town selectmen that if the banner didn't come down, he'd sue the town. The day the war began, the Unitarians rolled up their peace banner voluntarily. Still, the skirmish left the Harts feeling so out of sorts with Bedford, their home of 14 years, that they planned to move away.

Now, talking on the phone with his young warrior, Brian tried to understand what he was hearing. Don't believe spinmeisters on TV, Brian recalls his son saying; the Iraqi insurgency is real and building. John and his buddies in Charlie Company of the 508th Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade were patrolling ever longer distances in thin-skinned Humvees suited for hauling cargo, not for carrying soldiers under fire.

more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR2006061401928.html

[MikeNearMcChord]

1. Simple, the military-industrial complex

and their punk-a** perfumed princes at the Pentagon, would rather spend on whiz-bang star wars gagdets than providing protection for their troops.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. It is so sad that so many have been misled, and that it takes the death

of their loved ones to wake them up.
I would NEVER, EVER allow one of my loved ones to fight in this war, based on lies and deception, for BushCo.
In spite of the noble hearts and souls of those who are over there, the aims and goals of those who are sending them are not noble, and they do not give a crap about the safety of those they are sending over there to risk their lives.

[dsc]

3. a profoundly sad story

It should be front page news in every city of the nation. For lack of a $20 turniquet. For shame.

[enough]

4. And the war profiteers keep rolling along.

[robinlynne]

5. what an amazing article. I just read the entire article and I am wowed.

somehow that father made me feel strong. saying courage is fighting the battles you know you won't win, but fighting them anyway.

[leftchick]

6. oh my god....

this is just so much worse than I can take...

<snip>

Sams went back to kneel beside his lieutenant. "My pants legs were instantly covered, drenched in blood," Sams says. The bullet had severed Bernstein's femoral artery. The lieutenant was going to bleed to death if they didn't tie a tourniquet around his leg fast. But they hadn't been issued tourniquets.

Eight months earlier, a committee of military medical experts had urged the Pentagon to give every soldier in the war a tourniquet. Bleeding to death from an arm or leg wound is the most common cause of preventable death in combat, the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care reported. Quick access to a cheap, simple modern tourniquet could save many lives, military doctors had concluded. Yet it would be two more years before the U.S. Central Command, which runs combat operations in Iraq, adopted a policy saying all soldiers in combat should carry a tourniquet. Even then, the policy was moot because the Army didn't widely distribute tourniquets for several more months. An investigation by the Baltimore Sun spurred that distribution and documented one reason for the delay: Military procurement specialists were studying what kind of pouch to carry the new first aid kits with tourniquets in.

That left Sams, in October 2003, in much the same position as a soldier on a Revolutionary War battlefield: trying to improvise a tourniquet with a length of cloth and a stick. Only Sams couldn't find a stick in the Iraqi field.

"I was looking for anything hard," Sams recalls. He and Williams found a fuel-can nozzle in the Humvee. Sams wrapped a fresh field dressing around Bernstein's leg and used the gas nozzle to try to twist the dressing tightly enough to staunch the arterial bleed. As Sams twisted, the strings on the field dressing broke.

[Cha]

7. That's the most heart

breaking, gut wrenching account of the personal tragedies in Iraq..so eloquently sad.

I remember that when The Unitarian Church in Bedford was told they better take down their banner, "Speak Out For Peace".. or else.

I'm really sorry that Brian Hart had to find out bush was a Liar in such an irrevocably devastating manner.

Imagine the "Texas relatives" staying with the Liar-in-Chief instead of supporting your relatives who lost a son in Iraq. How stupid do you have to be?

[nealmhughes]

8. There is a basic corporate thinking that if the budget is not requested to

be substantially higher than reasonable each fiscal year, then getting what the outfit really needs to operate won't be reached. Unfortunately, such basics as armor and bandages get left aside so that the perfumed potentates can concentrate on "what really matters" such as media consultancy, umbrellas that use laser to shoot down enemy freeze rays and the ever elusive Romulan Cloaking Technology can be realized...
One thing that the special forces used very effectively in Afghanistan when we were still looking for al Qaeda and Old Sammy were mules. Yes, hee haw, half ass, half horse mules. Not helos, not land sats, or gps, nope, mules. They were very effective.
I haven't read word one for ages on that -- I guess the mules lacked night vision goggles, and HumVees do everything, now don't they?
Who needs doors and roofs made of metal? Oh, they can be shot thru the openings, oops. Surely there is a computer model to show how to avoid that, isn't there?
Let's get Haliburton on that one...why not get 100 motor heads with welding torches?
In WWII the allies had a tremendous getting thru the hedgerows in Normandy, not because of the centuries of bramble growth, but because of the drainage ditches and low stone fence hidden by the hedgerows. The Nazis could wait for the tanks to become elevated enough getting over the walls or the opposite, tilted down in the ditches to lob in a grenade to the underside. One lost tank. US guys who were factory workers took some buckets with forks and welded them to the front end of the tanks. They ripped the walls out. They then welded under skirts to the rear of the tanks. No more grenade problem.
No engineer or general had even thought of this. Why? Because they were in offices in London and NY and DC and SF, etc. The men's vulnerablility was not one they saw on paper...
The more things change...

[annabanana]

9. One family, another family

"I LOVE THIS GREEN," Brian says. He and Alma are walking hand in hand on Lexington Green. It is dusk the next evening. Brian points to the statue of John Parker, who led the town's minutemen. "I love that statue."

"Over there is where Paul Revere rode," he says, pointing out Battle Road, which leads to Concord. John, when he was preparing for basic training, used to run that road carrying 20 pounds of books in a rucksack.

"This is where the Revolution started," Brian says. "Forty Minutemen against 700 British. Twenty-to-one, just facing off. The farmers didn't give up."

And another family, walking a town green, grieving and carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

We can't give up. We must stop this.

[havocmom]

10. too low tech - not enough profit margin for the profiteers

gotta save $$ for what really counts... to the Military Industrial Complex!