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More Canadian injuries, fewer reported
Monday, October 1, 2007 | 04:37 AM ET By Kandahar Dispatch By David Common
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I’ve just spent a few days on a thrilling and depressing story. My camera operator and I were embedded with an American medevac helicopter crew. They’re a good, friendly, capable bunch of guys who welcomed us instantly.
By far, the majority of the injured who are loaded into the back of their heaving Blackhawks are Canadians.
That tells a tale now rarely talked about: a great many Canadian soldiers are being injured in Afghanistan. And we’re not hearing about it.
The question now is, why? Two years ago, at the outset of this more dangerous mission in southern Afghanistan, any and every injury was made public to journalists embedded with Canadian soldiers in Kandahar, and with Canadians at large.
Names of the injured weren’t always released, citing a very justifiable desire for privacy. But their general injuries always were. If someone was injured in a road accident, it was made public. Ditto for someone being shot, hit by a suicide bomber or a roadside bomb — even if it was a minor wound.
Now most injuries not reported
A new policy has clearly emerged. Deaths are still reported but injuries are not, unless one of two scenarios exists. The first is if the injury is so severe, it may very well result in death. The second is if journalists already know about it. If a journalist happens to be in a convoy that is hit and sees the injury, they’ll obviously know about it.
Injuries are increasingly frequent these days. As many as four roadside bomb strikes happen each week. Soldiers are being injured in the process, some of them seriously. Some of them will lose limbs. Others will have their lives irreparably damaged. We won’t know. Whether we should know is another question.
So what’s changed? There is the argument that politicians — fearing a further loss of public support for this mission — don’t want to reveal the true number of injuries. Another school of thought is that the injuries have become so routine, the military doesn’t view them as a “new development” and thus not newsworthy (or publicly releasable). A final argument is that there is now so much violence, the deployed soldiers’ would prefer to reduce the publication of bad news that will further worry their families back in Canada.
As the medevac crew was launched on one medical mission after another, we repeatedly saw Canadian soldiers being loaded and unloaded.
The point is this: soldiers have died in this place, but many more have been injured. The United States, which is engaged in its own largely unpopular war in Iraq, still releases injury statistics. Canada does not.
More on link
Answer to David Common's question in the article:
Maybe because the CF is sick and tired of the MSM blowing the minor injuries into big issues because they think they have to try to grab the headline in the next day's issue
