[link|http://www.salon.com/news/2007/03/11/fort_benning/|Salon.com]

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

Yet more scraping the bottom of the barrel. And from the looks of things the bottom can't take much more.

I think somebody in the Bush administration is trying to force the Democrats to be the ones to bring the troops back. That way the Republicans don't have to admit the war was a failure, they can it was the Democrats that kept us from winning.

Jay

And yet many remain staunch republicans
Go figure.

Too many have been taught that Republicans are pro-military and Democrats anti-military. And are stuck with that no matter what the two parties are actually doing at the moment.

I'd like to see the states all call back their guardsmen.

I would assume that the troops serving in Iraq have been nationalized, and thus are not under state control. But it would be amusing to see a hard anti-War governor try to do so.

Jay