Fighting Words
A book of poetry--yes, poetry--published by the UI Press spawns accusations of un-American behavior.

Ethics Under Fire
Historically, ethics change in wartime, when soldiers have been used as "guinea pigs for experimental drugs" and other treatments.

The Price of War
Maureen McCue, physician and instructor with the UI International Programs' Global Health Studies Program, contends that "to pretend medicine is making advances through war is like asking how many people you have to kill to do it."

The statistics look impressive, but they can't indicate the price individuals pay when they're wounded in war.

By the numbers, the war that's taken U.S. troops to Iraq for the past 39 months is a small one. Some 2,500 Americans killed, about 19,000 injured. Military medics tell us that 96 percent of the wounded who arrive alive at field hospitals like the one at Balad Air Base, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, will live. Such good numbers.

In comparison, World War II counted more than 408,000 Americans dead, more than 670,000 wounded, in a conflict that lasted 44 months. Numbers from the American Civil War are daunting, too: casualties from Antietam alone amounted to 6,000 soldiers killed, more than four times the number of Americans lost on D-Day. Historians figure that September 17, 1862, is the bloodiest single day in U.S. history.

It is a credit to our medical establishment that a much larger percentage of wounded soldiers survive wars fought in the 21st century. Innovative technologies and techniques, protocols that stabilize the injured and move them quickly on to other facilities for additional, specialized treatment and care, have meant that more who are wounded in war survive their injuries. Unfortunately, the numbers reveal only part of the story.

This Fourth of July, a day for parades and fireworks and gratitude for our freedoms, ABC World News broadcast a story about polytrauma, the new medical specialty that's grown out of the war in Iraq. They took viewers inside James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida, to see teams of physicians and other medical specialists working with some of our most catastrophically wounded soldiers.

Thankfully, most of us have no firsthand knowledge of the difficult work that these horrifically hurt soldiers undertake in their hopes to reclaim some quality of life. Only 1,500 of our troops have sustained injuries as complex and devastating as those suffered by Sergeant Lee Jones and Sergeant Russ Marek-the men featured in ABC's story.

And I cannot get them out of my mind. Sergeant Jones, for instance, was so badly burned when his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb in October 2005 that his extremities appear reduced to sticks, his skin shiny and red and so tightly stretched across his body that he still can't walk or cradle his infant daughter, Angel, in his arms. He wants desperately to do both these things, but after nine months of therapy with teams of the best specialists available, he remains painfully confined within a scarred shell of his former self.

We might congratulate the medical establishment for all the advances war promotes, but we should never forget the individuals-like 23-year-old Lee Jones-who face countless battles and years of rehabilitation even after they've been evacuated from the battlefield.

Learn More Online...
	The Price Of War		Matching Game: War Quotes
	Ethics Under Fire		Multiple Choice: War & Medicine
	Medical Advances