34 United States The EconomistNovember 9th 2019
W
hen sergeant liam dwyerof Connecticut trod on a booby-
trapped bomb in southern Afghanistan the explosion could
be heard 13 miles away. It blew off his left leg, much of his right one,
left his left arm “hanging by threads” and smashed his right arm.
“I’m bleeding out and about to die,” he recalls thinking before he
blacked out. His field-medic turned away to work on lesser casual-
ties. But another marine sergeant clapped tourniquets on what re-
mained of Mr Dwyer and hauled him to a helicopter. A week later,
after round-the-clock treatment by American and British medics
in Afghanistan, Germany and on many aircraft, he awoke at Walter
Reed National Military Medical Centre. His parents were by his
bed. Thinking he was still on the battlefield, Mr Dwyer lunged for-
wards to try to protect them.
Eight years later he was back at Walter Reed in Bethesda, Mary-
land—and life was great, he told your columnist. He had some
gripes, to be sure: including incessant operations (he has had “well
over 60”), the impossibility of holding down a regular job because
of his treatment and a terror of undoing years of painful therapy by
slipping in the shower. On the other hand he was a big fan of his
new prosthetic leg, which had been embedded in his femur: he
would “recommend osseointegration to anyone,” he said. Indeed
he was “looking forward to getting his right leg amputated” too,
maybe a decade from now.
He was reluctant to get it done sooner only because he still
needed the painfully damaged limb for his work as a racing-car
driver with Mazda, for which he also gave thanks. And he loved his
wife, an occupational therapist he had met at Walter Reed. “I had
this positive outlook from the get-go,” he said. “If there’s some-
thing out there that you want to do, you can either be a pioneer or
else find someone who can help you out with it. When you have a
negative attitude, no one wants to be around you, which starts
screwing with your mind. A lot of guys have issues with that.”
Media coverage of the participants in America’s interminable
9/11 wars tends to focus on the health and social problems many
face. Of the 2.7m who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 35% are
said by the Department of Veterans Affairs to have a disability. That
includes many with post-traumatic stress, which makes sense: pa-
trolling built-up areas of Iraq at the height of its violence was espe-ciallyhorrific.Andtheconcussive effects of blast injuries are lia-
ble to be long-term. Yet such figures may be misleading.
Many disability claims on the vaare alleged to be exaggerated
or distantly related to military service. And other indicators of vet-
erans’ well-being are more reassuring. Only 3.8% of post-9/11 veter-
ans are unemployed, scarcely more than the general populace.
Moreover, the number of soldiers officially counted as wounded-
in-action in Iraq and Afghanistan is only 53,000 (2% of the total
who served). And around half, having minor injuries, returned to
the fray within 72 hours. Almost two decades of war by America’s
million-odd troops, waged against an enemy heavily reliant on
roadside bombs, has produced around 2,000 amputees. And that
surprisingly low number is despite a revolution in the survival rate
of badly wounded soldiers. The Department of Defence estimates
the improved tourniquet that saved Mr Dwyer was alone responsi-
ble for saving 3,000 lives—roughly half the total American death
toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Other breakthroughs at every stage of the military medical pro-
cess, from use of psychotherapy to computerised prosthetics, have
meanwhile improved the long-term outlook for severely wounded
vets like Mr Dwyer. Notwithstanding the well-advertised pro-
blems at the va, they cannot doubt the government has their
back—or that society does, given the thousands of veterans’
groups that have mushroomed. “I hate to see any veteran strug-
gling, but I have to ask, have you asked for help? Because it’s out
there,” said another Walter Reed outpatient, Captain Ferris Butler,
who lost his feet to an improvised bomb south of Baghdad in 2006.
Unlike Mr Dwyer he admits to having been haunted by demons
after his injury. But like him he met his wife at Walter Reed, has
proceeded from one success to the next—in business, philanthro-
py and sport—and exudes positivity and derring-do.
As Americans approach what may be the last Veterans Day of
the war in Afghanistan, their longest ever, they may console them-
selves with this thought. Contrary to the reported inundation of
damaged post-9/11 veterans, their country has been remarkably
unscathed by two decades at war. Iraq and Afghanistan vets repre-
sent much less than 1% of the population. America lost eight times
as many soldiers in Vietnam, in less than half the time, when its
population was two-thirds the current size. The number of recent
wounded is correspondingly modest and most have been looked
after with immense skill and no expense spared, as is right. Other-
wise, few Americans have been touched by the conflicts at all.Who pays the piper?
Future generations will pay for them: the wars have been funded
by debt. Most Americans have had little reason to think their coun-
try is even at war. And lucky them because war is hell. But this dis-
connect helps explain why the country’s civil-military relations
are as distant as they are. It also helps explain how America came
to be locked in such long and largely unproductive conflicts in the
first place. Its voters started to reckon with the rights and wrongs
of the Vietnam war—then demand accountability for it—only after
they felt its sting. By contrast Donald Trump, who almost alone
among national politicians decries the latest conflicts, has strug-
gled to interest voters in them—or indeed end them.
Though mostly wrong on the details, the president raises an
important question of the long wars. What have they achieved?
After thanking Mr Butler and Dwyer for their service on Veterans
Day (a ritual neither wounded man greatly enjoys, incidentally),
their well-wishers might want to ponder that. 7Lexington But thank you for your service
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost most Americans nothing. That is why they continue