Sgt. Shurvon Phillip and his mother

Pat Robertson asserted that on the eve of the Iraq invasion Bush told him there would be no casualties.

Five years and ten weeks later, more than 4,000 Americans have been killed, more than 30,000 are listed as wounded.

But they are not all of the casualties, nor is that where the story ends.

In Iraq’s Anbar Province, in May 2005, Shurvon [Phillip], who joined the Marine reserves seven years earlier at 17, partly as a way to pay his community-college tuition, was riding back to his base after a patrol when an anti-tank mine exploded under his Humvee. The Humvee’s other soldiers were tossed in different directions and dealt an assortment of injuries: concussions, broken bones, herniated discs. Along with a broken jaw and a broken leg, Shurvon suffered one of the war’s signature wounds on the American side: though no shrapnel entered his head, the blast rattled his brain profoundly.

Far more effectively than in previous American wars, helmets and body armor are protecting the skulls and saving the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a joint Defense Department and V.A. organization, about 900 soldiers have come home with serious traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., which essentially means dire harm to their brains; it can be caused by explosions that deliver blunt injury to the helmeted skull or that send waves of compressed air to slam and snap the head ruinously even at a distance of hundreds of yards from the blast. (The 900 also include injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets that have managed to penetrate.) Some of these veterans have been left — for protracted periods and often permanently — unable to think or remember or plan clearly enough to cope with everyday life on their own; others, like Shurvon, have been left incapable of doing much at all for themselves. (A recent Rand Corporation report estimates that, additionally, 300,000 soldiers have suffered milder T.B.I., frequently including brief loss of consciousness, disorientation or cognitive lapses.)

George Bush’s War, the war that John McCain more than figuratively embraces has accomplished little strategically or tactically, except provided excuses for its proponents to say we need to stay there and fund it with real-life monopoly money until some metaphysically undefined moment of victory comes.

But for the millions of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Americans there is nothing esoteric about it. For the mother of Shurvon Phillip, no matter when the mission is half-heartedly (but full-throatedly) claimed accomplished, duty will always call:

He was silent now, turned onto his back again. In the near-darkness, she dipped a washcloth and squeezed it from above his thighs so that a tiny waterfall dripped down over him. “Don’t worry, big guy,” she said. “Mama’s got you.” She swabbed him with the cloth.

“The first time I gave my son a bath,” Gail told me about life after Shurvon’s injury, as we sat again at the kitchen table, “I cried. It took me a good while to get used to cleaning him up. In the morning if we have to go somewhere, everything that a mom with a baby has to walk with — wipes and everything in a bag — I have to walk with.” She talked about the A&D ointment that kept him from getting rashes, and she talked about how she imagined he thought about this aspect of his life. “Nobody wants anybody else to clean them. He wouldn’t look at it like he’s a child again. He’s this grown man, but he just can’t do it.” Then she remembered that before his deployment, when she would get upset about this or that difficulty in her life, he would say: “ ‘Mom, what are you crying for? If Plan A don’t work, Plan B will work.’ ”

There is always another plan, and always more sacrifices, for George Bush’s War.

John McCain yesterday continued his bombastic shell-game with Barack Obama proclaiming the latter needed to visit Iraq because "He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time."

Maybe John McCain should spend some time filling the shoes of Shurvon Phillip’s mother and tell her and his family how awesome it all really is?

No related posts.