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Uncovering another hidden cost of war

Thursday, September 21, 2006

If you’re a media outlet wanting to get something big onto the national agenda, it helps to have an essential source in your own backyard.

A group of local public television stations in California, from down in San Diego up to Sacramento, combine their efforts every week to make a show called California Connected. Emerging from Ward 7-D, the polytrauma unit of Palo Alto’s Veterans' Administration Hospital, have come details of some human devastation exacted by the Iraq insurgency that’s wholly new in its scope and severity. California Connected has enterprisingly told this story but - so far at least - it has received little national coverage.

It’s not a very obvious kind of war wound. In medical terminology it’s known as TBI, or traumatic brain injury - damage that’s hard to repair, not least because the brain tissue involved has the consistency of room-temperature Jell-O.

TBI is turning out to be the signature injury of Iraq operations - terribly debilitating but often undetected. It’s inflicted on soldiers’ brains by the ever-mounting number of roadside bombs, or “Improvised Explosive Devices”.

Typically, an IED goes off, two or three soldiers are seriously injured, and the military’s medical teams hurry to MedEvac their obviously wounded troops for treatment. But, in the words of Palo Alto neuropsychologist Harriet Zeiner: “The other five guys in the truck were thrown against the walls and they had blast effect. They just pick up and they go”.

Indeed it’s often much later that the trauma to their brains becomes evident, suggesting that the concussive force has ricocheted around inside the boney shell of the skull.

California Connected highlighted the case of Staff Sergeant Jay Wilkerson (pictured above) who was wounded in Baghdad. He told the TV team: “If I didn’t have on this neck brace and I was walking around normally you wouldn’t know anything was wrong”. Outwardly Wilkerson does look okay at first glance, but he doesn’t exactly walk around normally – in fact many motor functions, even picking up a paperclip, are dauntingly difficult for him because of his neurological damage.

Claudia Carreon, a specialist in the National Guard who's also afflicted by TBI, cannot follow conversations during her therapy (“One at a time please. You guys are speaking too fast for me”). And to her greater distress, she cannot remember her two year-old daughter, cannot even remember she was ever pregnant.

Correspondent Lisa McCree who reported the story – and has pushed it onto PBS’s flagship broadcast, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer – says that the VA’s estimate of having treated about 800 soldiers seriously under-counts the number of sufferers. Neurologists reckon it’s more like 8,000.

Meanwhile it’s been left almost entirely to another local outlet, the Charlotte Observer newspaper in North Carolina (with Fort Bragg in its circulation area) to protest in rightly outraged terms about Pentagon plans to cut, yes cut, the budget of the Defense and Veterans’ Brain Injury Center - one of whose ten units nationwide is at Fort Bragg.

A VALUED, WARM FRIEND of mine used to report and analyze with enormous authority the Northern Irish “troubles”, and especially the inscrutable internal politics of the IRA. His name was Jack Holland; sadly and unfairly he died in 2004.

Now his long-awaited book on a much broader and even more ancient conflict is published. It’s called MISOGYNY – The World’s Oldest Prejudice, published by Carroll and Graf in the US, and Constable and Robinson in the UK. The story of its eventual appearance is in itself a story of struggle.

Jack had just turned in his manuscript to the publishers who had commissioned him, Penguin Viking, when he was taken ill with lymphoma, and he was dead within weeks. Viking decided to kill the book, and after some very unpleasant exchanges, an agreement with Jack’s family (his wife Mary Hudson and daughter Jenny Holland) was finally negotiated. Rather less than half of the publishers’ $100,000 advance was paid, and Mary and Jenny were allowed to seek another publisher. It took two years, but they won out in the end.

Above all though, it is the book itself that wins out. I admit I’m predisposed to like anything from Jack – but any readers of any persuasion are bound to register his expose’s thoroughness, his firm tone of outrage (but with much wryness mixed in) while he tellingly unravels the strands of society’s ugly subjugation of women - that “Gordian knot of interwoven dependencies”, as Jack calls it in one of his many glinting, incisive phrases.

A BIT ODDLY, THOUGH A QUICK GOOGLE will confirm it, I was among the first to use the word vlogging. I hailed in the first The Media Beat of 2005 the astonishing worldwide spread of amateur video coverage, posted on the web in blogging form, of the Asian tsunami. Now the inevitable has happened, and the phenomenon is getting institutionalized - as an internet co-venture between Yahoo! and Al Gore’s one-year-old venture Current TV, which you’ll recall was built around the then-daring notion of “User-Generated Content”.

Under its somewhat un-original name, the Current Buzz vlogging web-channel will be run by Jon Stewart’s one-time The Daily Show producer Madeleine Smithberg. Her unenviable task is to ensure both quality and popularity, while screening out the offensive stuff, in videos submitted by her target demographic aged 18-24. Revenue-producing advertising will appear in the form of pre-roll video-ads lasting 15 or 30 seconds.

None of this would have been possible, of course without that other one-year-old, YouTube.com, which came crashing through the ether as its own tsunami and now grabs 20 million viewers a month. Latest Wall Street speculation puts the infant at worth a billion dollars to a corporate buyer.