DU Questions, Insults, Returning Amputees

Amputee Soldiers Return To Active Duty
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.com
In the blur of smoke and blood after a bomb blew up under his Humvee in Iraq, Sgt. Tawan Williamson looked down at his shredded leg and knew it couldn't be saved. His military career, though, pulled through.

Less than a year after the attack, Williamson is running again with a high-tech prosthetic leg and plans to take up a new assignment, probably by the fall, as an Army job counselor and affirmative action officer in Okinawa, Japan.

In an about-face by the Pentagon, the military is putting many more amputees back on active duty - even back into combat, in some cases.

Williamson, a 30-year-old Chicago native who is missing his left leg below the knee and three toes on the other foot, acknowledged that some will be skeptical of a maimed soldier back in uniform.

"But I let my job show for itself," he said. "At this point, I'm done proving. I just get out there and do it."

Previously, a soldier who lost a limb almost automatically received a quick discharge, a disability check and an appointment with the Veterans Administration.

But since the start of the Iraq war, the military has begun holding on to amputees, treating them in rehab programs like the one here at Fort Sam Houston and promising to help them return to active duty if that is what they want.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Amputee_Soldiers.html

DUers Intentionally Misunderstand and Hype this:

--I am flabbergasted. Are amputees being ordered back or is it voluntary?

--Looks to be at their request or at least the soldier featured in the article requested it, but since the start of the Iraq war, the military has begun holding on to amputees...

--My friend was sent back into combat on crutches. So this doesn't really surprise me. The military planned to discharge him on disability, but he appealed, hoping to become a drill instr.

No drill instructing for him but a clerk job pushing papers. He could have gotten out. Guess life at a VA hospital would have been worse then pencil pushing from a mil spec desk.

--The is the start of RoboTroops... Pretty soon, once maimed, troops will be forced to stay in and complete their enlistments. They will be rebuilt. Maybe like the bionic man or RoboCop. The future is a man blown to bits, rebuilt with nothing but his vital organs intact encased in a warfighters collection of engineered body parts.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2864304

This is absolute nonsense. The article itself explains that it only does this with soldiers that badly WANT to go back into the war zone.

For many of them, the one burning desire they have is to go back and support their brothers who are still fighting. To treat them as gullible dupes who are being sent in harms way while 'crippled' is the height of exploitation and manipulation.

All those Dems who think our troops are nothing more than infantile children who are 'being made' to go to war--telling them that they are just cannon fodder--are handicapping them more than their war wounds ever will.