Mother Jones
The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the
dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void—something missing. A
missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily
patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red
at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what
remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American
flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and
medical monitors.
That man and two other critically wounded soldiers—one
with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the
thigh— were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to
the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in
Germany. A tattoo on the soldier's remaining arm read, "DEATH BEFORE
DISHONOR."
I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the
casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming
from Afghanistan, he told me. "A lot from the Horn of Africa," he added.
"You don't really hear about that in the media."
"Where in Africa?" I
asked. He said he didn't know exactly, but generally from the Horn,
often with critical injuries. "A lot out of Djibouti," he added,
referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main US military base in Africa, but from "elsewhere" in the region, too.
Since the "Black Hawk Down" deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago,
we've heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in
Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special
operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by US
military sources as "Moroccan prostitutes," in a mysterious car accident
in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from
Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in
twenty-first-century US military strategy.
These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of
wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq.
They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp
Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future US bases "scattered," as one academic explains, "across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence."
