Shades of another foredoomed cause from long ago.
U.S. Army Hospital in Germany Is Treating Americans Hurt Fighting in Ukraine
The Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center has quietly started admitting Ukrainian Army soldiers who were wounded in combat, most of them American volunteers.
“Volunteers.” Oh, I like that. “Quietly,” too. Not that either sounds at all familiar to someone of my advanced age, of course. NOT. AT. ALL.
A group of Ukrainian Army soldiers pierced by Russian grenades and mortar shells arrived at a hospital recently in need of surgery. It would have been a familiar scene from the bloody war grinding on in Ukraine, except for two crucial differences: Most of the wounded soldiers were American, and so was the hospital — the U.S. Army’s flagship medical center in Germany.
The Army has quietly started to treat wounded Americans and other fighters evacuated from Ukraine at its Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Though the number so far is small — currently 14 — it marks a notable new step in the United States’ deepening involvement in the conflict.
When the war erupted in 2022, hundreds of Americans — many of them military veterans — rushed to help defend Ukraine. Nineteen months later, perhaps a few hundred are still there, volunteering for local militias or serving under contract with the Ukrainian national army.
An unknown number of them have been shot, hit by artillery, blown up by mines or otherwise injured in combat. About 20 have been killed. Most of the wounded have had to rely on a patchwork of Ukrainian hospitals and Western charities for help. Now, though, the Pentagon has stepped in to offer some of them the same care it gives to American active-duty troops.
The hospital at Landstuhl is authorized to do so under a Defense Department policy, which began last summer, that allows the hospital to treat up to 18 wounded members of the Ukrainian forces at a time, the Pentagon confirmed in a statement. The fact that most of the Ukrainian troops at Landstuhl are Americans illustrates how the war has progressed in unexpected ways.
The Biden administration vowed at the start of the war that it would not put American troops on the ground in Ukraine, and it warned Americans not to get involved. Now it finds itself treating those it told to stay away.
Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, knowhatImeanrightright?
Asked about the development by The New York Times, a Defense Department official who is regularly briefed on Ukraine-Russia matters expressed surprise, and said that leaders at the Pentagon were unaware that Landstuhl was regularly treating wounded American volunteers, but added that the leaders were not concerned about it.
I’m sure they aren’t. Because you know damned well they DID know about it. Because they’re, y’know, running it.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, noted that while the administration strongly discourages American citizens from going to Ukraine to fight, it is obvious that some go anyway, and if they become wounded and end up at Landstuhl, the military is not going to turn them away.
One would certainly hope not. Then again, seeing as how this country’s “leadership” is pure, unadulterated Evil Incarnate, one wouldn’t be much surprised to learn that they were.
Incroyable, innit, how everything old is new again.
(Via WRSA)
- Entries
File this under “spun bullshit”.
After twenty years of constant war in the Sandbox after 9/11, color me shocked that some US military veterans volunteered in Ukraine. Next you’ll tell me that, incredibly, we hired some to be contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Shocking news, right?
14 of them ended up in Landstuhl?
Wow, there’s a poser. Military veterans getting medical benefits. Stop the presses.
When I was in the base hospital at Swamp Lejeune in the mid-1980s, 99% of the hospital patient population was military veterans there for treatment of non-service-connected conditions.
Because military-age males 17-45 don’t get a helluva lot of medical problems in peacetime, certainly not enough to fill a base hospital with hundreds of beds that would otherwise have been mostly vacant.
The “Wow!” factor of this entire story is right up there with the news that the sun rises in the morning.