Wounded soldier thankful despite 19 surgeries

Wounded soldier thankful despite 19 surgeries
By Holbrook Mohr - The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Nov 11, 2007 10:24:02 EST

JACKSON, Miss. — Sgt. 1st Class Norris Galatas has suffered through 19 surgeries in less than three years since he was wounded by an explosion in Iraq. But his time is not spent on regret — he says he’d do it again for nothing more than the thanks a soldier deserves.

Galatas, who serves in the Mississippi Army National Guard, hopes people will remember on Veterans Day that the freedoms they enjoy were secured by the sacrifices of those in uniform.

“Veterans Day is a day when most vets remember the friends that they fought and died with, but I think the general public does not think about it as much as veterans do,” Galatas said in a telephone interview from his hospital room.

Galatas was severely injured by a roadside bomb in April 2005. A piece of shrapnel ripped a hole through his stomach. The injury was so severe it took 55 units of blood to keep him alive.

Since then, the 44-year-old Meridian resident has spent most of his time in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. A piece of mesh in his abdomen holds his insides together.

“I’m not bitter. It’s hard for people to understand, but people who join the military join because they feel a calling they can’t explain,” he said. “It’s something inside of you that says, ‘I need to serve this country where I have all these freedoms.’



Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/ap_veteransstory_071110/

"We who are about to die, salute you."

It's sad his gallant sacrifice had to be made for such an ignoble cause.

Removing a dictator who started 2 wars that killed over 1 million people (Iran-Iraq War, and the first Gulf War) and also used chemical weapons on his own people and repressed his own people for several decades?

let alone Iraq.

We went into Iraq to steal their oil and set up military bases to replace those we were losing in Saudi Arabia. In the process we have killed more than a million Iraqis and made refugees out of millions more.

Yeah, a great and noble cause -- at least according to the Neo-cons, Cheney, George Bush and their fascist fellow-travelers.

But the poor devil who was used by the bastards is not at fault. He is every bit as much a victim as the Iraqi people in this sordid and criminal foreign policy disaster.

.....while there have been plenty of fuck-ups in OIF, even available in open source news, (the GAO has a long list) I haven't seen a drop of oil stolen yet, and the huge bases we built in Qatar more than replaced the ones in KSA.

the Bush administration upon the Iraqi government are prime examples of colonial exploitation.

And the grotesque, bloated "embassy" complex being built by conquerers of Baghdad reeks of planned colonial domination and rule.

If, as you point out, the permanent bases in Iraq aren't needed, then what is their purpose? More billions to line the pockets of Bush's corporate cronies?

Yeah, over 4,000 "coalition" deaths, over one million Iraqi deaths and over two million Iraqis displaced and Bush & Company has yet to bring home the prize from its immoral and illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, but not for want of trying.

Sixty years after the fact, Hitler's American banker's great-grandson can't make the trains run on time.

Because I can not believe that on average about 18k people are being killed a month since the invasion was launched in 2003.

occupation.

From The Guardian:

General Tommy Franks, the US commander in the Iraq war last year, spelled it out before the invasion began.
"We don't do body counts," he said, referring to the Iraqis that might be killed in the forthcoming conflict.

His deputies were left to explain why a careful toll of American dead was kept but Iraqi deaths went unrecorded.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1369497,00.html





In response to your request:

/www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/uk-poll-consistent-with-1_b_64475.html

and the Just Foreign Policy website states that it is not a scientific report, but a rough estimate.


And to get to the level of 1 million people killed in Iraq, we have to accept that every day on average 600 people are being killed around the country and not being reported by ANY news media anywhere in the world.

For a rebuttal of that 1 million figure, please go to the following site as they explain this much better than I could do with snip and paste.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-ch... /


I would have to also state that I find their estimate of less than 10% of your claims to be closer to the truth.

to lock Charles Manson away for life. It's too bad the war criminals in our government aren't held to as high a standard.

How many were killed in the Holocaust? Two million? Five million? Ten million? Would even a figure as low as 100,000 make it any less a crime? As Stalin pointed out, at some point mass murder becomes nothing but statistics.

Given the occupiers' unwillingness to keep track of the civilian slaughter in Iraq, there is no way to come up with reliable figures. But whether 100,000; 1,000,000 or some figure in between, it remains a war crime nonetheless, and the lack of interest in the carnage being done to civilians belies the pretended good intentions of the war criminals who planned and executed the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. But then no benign invader with a goal of liberating a nation would have used "Shock and Awe" against a civilian target, so that pretense was threadbare from the start.

The death of even 100,000 civilians is no more acceptable than that of 2,974, whether the victims be Iraqis or Americans.

against his neighbors and treated his opponents in brutal fashion? (Chemical weapons against the Kurds, rape rooms for the women of political opponents, mass murder to include the villages of anyone who spoke out against him)



And I agree with you on the death toll not being acceptable. Many of those killed are by car bombings or other measures that are instigated by non Iraqi terrorists inside Iraq.
When we went into Iraq, Bremmer screwed up and allowed the situation to deteriorate to this debacle and I will forever hate him for that. The same with the politicians who did not listen to the generals that said we needed more troops and a better plan for after Saddam was ousted.

who are brutal despots. Chop-chop Square didn't get it's nickname for nothing. Need we go down the long list of Latin American countries where we not only have supported, but in some cases have installed, equally brutal dictators?

Have you read about how Saddam came to power? A hint: the British and the CIA helped the Baathist party overthrow a democratically-elected government (which dared to suggest keeping more of the Iraqi oil profits for the Iraqi people) and later helped him single out "dangerous" students for execution after he staged his coup.


And just which nation was it which backed him up in his war against Iran and supplied him with chemical and biological weapons? (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html) But then, at the time, he was being touted as the democratic hope of the Middle East, a mind-boggling contention to anyone even remotely familiar with his past.

The Bush Crime family, using the cover of 9/11, has shredded our Constitution and taken away RIGHTS which even our ancestors enjoyed under the British Crown before the Revolution.

If Iraq had not had vast reserves of oil, do you really think we would have staged our glorious war of liberation, which was first sold as self-defense against WMD, which later turned out to be nonexistent? It took several more patently absurd attempted-justifications for the invasion before we settled on "liberation," a liberation which highlighted "Shock and Awe," a clumsily-renamed version of the Blitzkrieg -- you know, the old Nazi tactic invented to liberate Rotterdam and other captive cities.

All that remains to be seen is whether George Herbert Walker's great-grandson and Prescott Bush's grandson will do his ancestors proud and in effect "make the trains run on time" by bringing home the oil for which so many innocent people have been murdered. Happy motoring.

oil....Bush and bin Laden are linked to Hitler" themes on a vets board, why not rail about the shit that is obvious and glaring to vets regarding OIF.

The large emabassy, walled and self-sustaining for utilities like a university, is probably how we should have been building embassies from Greece to Pakistan, instead of just accepting that State Dept employees were going to get killed every year.

The "permanent bases" being built in Iraq are already starting to get turned over the the "permanent occupants", the Iraqis.

Here's the real shit that pisses off vets: that the CENTCOM plan for OIF worked with the assumption that "The Iraqi regular army would “capitulate and provide security...”for the ASP's and the borders, rather than just ditching their uniforms and going home and trying to get a paying job for the first time in a few years.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07639t.pdf