EDITORIAL
Returning wounded don't need red tape

You occasionally notice them at the island's military commissaries: wounded soldiers navigating the aisles in wheelchairs or on crutches.

And they're just the few out in public.

Others are sequestered away in military hospitals, mourning a military service cut short by debilitating injuries.

No amount of Purple Heart medals can make up for their loss.

As far as sympathy and gratitude go, we can't show them enough of it. The last conflict with this many American soldiers coming home to recover from wounds was the Vietnam War.

The Department of Defense this week listed 1,069 troops killed in action, 10,177 wounded in action and 367 who died in noncombat situations out of 300,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 70 percent of wounded Americans survived in World War II; 76 percent survived in Vietnam, and the survival rate in Iraq and Afghanistan is 90 percent.

That's great. But while more soldiers are surviving because of body armor, their unprotected limbs are often severely damaged, according to Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who wrote the New England journal article.

And, it turns out, many of these wounded veterans are struggling for benefits. Take the case of Chief Warrant Office Cody Sharp, an Army pilot based at Schofield Barracks whose helicopter was shot down in Iraq. He survived the gunfire but lost the use of his left arm.

Sharp was among 150 vets meeting in Florida last week to learn how to navigate a veterans-care bureaucracy that can make them wait four months for disability benefits.

He said nobody ever discussed disability payments with him when he was on the job. That left him wholly unprepared when severe injuries brought him home.

The system dealing with veteran's benefits is overworked and underfinanced, according to Disabled American Veterans spokesman David Autry.

With such vast numbers of returning wounded, the system must be brought swiftly up to speed.

These soldiers have made the next-to-ultimate sacrifice for their country. A grateful nation shouldn't force them to spend their first months of recovery wrestling with red tape.