I’m Convinced That Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Actually Care About Our Armed Service Members

3 min readThat there is public criticism of the military by military families is a significant political event. They are taking on a considerable risk in doing so, and the fact that this criticism seems to be rising toward something like a crescendo is a measure of this administration’s folly. The risks are doubled when the criticism comes from the troops themselves. And this dispatch from the Associated Press is horrific.Nine U.S. service members who were wounded spoke to the AP on the record—rare for troops still in the Army—about what they describe as a medical system that left them in many ways fighting to get treatment on their own. ...The soldiers’ criticism comes against the backdrop of years of disinvestment and drawdowns in the Middle East by multiple administrations and political leaders who sought to end U.S. involvement in the region. Those choices left the region without any major U.S.-run medical facilities. [Army Lt. Col. Arturo] Lincón’s wounds included a damaged left vertebral artery, which supplies blood to the brain, and put him at risk for a stroke. That was not considered by the Army to be serious enough to be admitted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, a major U.S. military facility, even though Lincón said a nurse there marveled that he was alive.It gets worse.After the deadly drone strike, soldiers, who are equipped with tourniquets and trained in first aid, tended to each other and then searched on Google to race the wounded to the nearest hospital in Kuwait City about 20 minutes away.Some of the most seriously wounded soldiers were medically evacuated from Kuwait within two days. Lincón, who was only about 7 feet (2.1 meters) from the blast, spent a week hospitalized there where he had surgery to remove shrapnel from his jaw. He said medical staff told him he had a traumatic brain injury from the force of the blast that ruptured his eardrum and left him briefly blinded.Chief Warrant Officer 4 Rodney Bearman, who had shrapnel embedded from his face to his legs, and some of the other soldiers who were briefly seen at Kuwaiti medical facilities were sent to the homes of U.S. government employees. Iran had unleashed missiles and drones that made it risky for evacuation flights.They needed to Google the route to the hospital.Some 10 days after the attack, the soldiers were loaded onto a cargo plane. They sat on the floor with straps, including Bearman, who could barely eat or lie down. When they arrived in Germany, Bearman said they learned they were not documented as wounded in combat and would not be hospitalized at Landstuhl. Instead, they were sent to the barracks, as Lincón had been, and told to get outpatient care. Bearman said they were documented that way due to a coding error. “Never did I think that if I was wounded that these things would happen,” said Bearman, who has served for over three decades, including in Afghanistan. “Some sacred trust that I thought would never be broken was broken.”Believe it or not, one of the wounded soldiers had other problems.Lincón, who was born in Texas to Mexican parents, was issued only a temporary one-year passport after his passport was blown up in the attack and he was asked for additional documentation to prove his U.S. citizenship. After the AP reached out to the State Department to inquire about his case, the 1995 West Point graduate said he received a call saying the request for more information was a mistake and he would be receiving a passport that would be good for 10 years. “I’m American enough to have fought in three different wars,” Lincón said.Some of these intolerable circumstances predate the current administration, but it happened on this administration’s watch and as a result of this administration’s war of choice, which it seems to have launched without a week’s preparation. This horror story is on them. Maybe the Secretary of Talking About War could take a few hours off from preparing Instagram videos. Maybe the president could order him to do so. Yeah, right.