The Injured...

In the newspapers and network news reports, wounded U.S. soldiers have taken somewhat of a back seat to the over 1000 men and women who have died in Iraq. Almost Over 7000 of our troops have returned home with serious, often debilitating injuries.



Nina Berman has created a series of photographs of some of these soldiers and has compiled many of them in a book, Purple Hearts.

I wonder if these stories might make a more compelling case for getting out of Iraq. It seems as if the death toll of the war has done little to affect public opinion -- perhaps because we have come to accept death as a form of patriotism. We don't see the death every day, we only hear about it or watch the numbers go up. Then we salute the fallen in May.

Time has a flash presentation using some of her photographs and audio of her interviews and yesterday, Berman appeared on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulis...

"I started taking these photographs because I wasn't seeing any images of wounded soldiers. I kept hearing reports on radio, television — three wounded today, four wounded today — but I was never seeing any images, and I wanted to go out and discover, see who these people were, what happened to them and what their life is like now.

"I'm not sure why they are forgotten. There are so many of them — right now there are over 7000 from hostile fire, and many more thousand wounded from accidents, psychological trauma, sickness. I focused on the wounded, because they have stories they can tell. You can see war's effects through them.

"The soldiers all really wanted to participate in the project. They want their stories told, they want to be out there.

"So many of them are so young — I'm talking 19-years-old, 20, 21-years-old. This is not a temporary thing. This is something they will live with the rest of their lives, and people should really get a sense of what war does.

"The injuries are shocking. It's not just a simple bullet wound to the arm. These are injuries like brain damage, amputees, blindness, massive internal injuries — lifelong injuries that soldiers will never recover from.

"The pictures — there is a loneliness that comes through all the pictures, and I think soldiers are very reluctant to express any vulnerability or loneliness, but somehow the camera captures this."