Who's Responsible?

Former Army major Tammy Duckworth lost both her legs in Iraq. The helicopter pilot--a major in the Illinois Army National Guard--was flying a Black Hawk over hostile territory when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her aircraft. Duckworth spent the next 13 months in hospitals and rehab centers, in a wheelchair or on prosthetic limbs, trying to relearn the skills she'd once taken for granted. "It's the very little things," that can be the hardest, she says. "It's something as mundane as trying to do your laundry. For me, it was changing the sheets on my bed. How do you do that if you have no legs?"

Duckworth is now running for Congress as a Democrat, hoping to win Henry Hyde's seat representing Chicago's western suburbs. But she's the exception: most of the more than 8,000 American soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't doing nearly so well. With record numbers of soldiers surviving injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars, veterans' organizations are questioning whether the federal government is able--or is willing--to cope with the demand for health-care benefits, rehabilitation services and ongoing treatment. And if Washington can't do it, then who should?

Enter the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. Since last July, the nonprofit group has raised more than $25 million in private funds for the construction of a training and rehabilitation center for soldiers returning from battle with catastrophic injuries and amputations. To be built on site at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, the 60,000-foot marble and granite Intrepid Center needs $10 million more before it can be completed. Once it's finished--tentatively in January 2007--the Veterans Administration and the military will take over. The facility will be able to work with as many as 100 returning soldiers and veterans at any given time.

But should such an institution really be funded by private sources? Inevitably, organizations like Intrepid have raised questions about whether the Bush administration--committed to two wars--is too stretched to properly take care of returning veterans. "It's surprising to us that there needs to be a facility that's privately funded, and we hope that the Congress and the Bush administration will recognize that we need to meet these goals of the severely injured," says Peter Gayton, director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. "The fact that the Intrepid Center needs to exist shows that the VA is not receiving enough funding."

The debate is being fueled by syndicated radio host Don Imus, who has donated $250,000 and has made raising money for the fund a regular feature on his morning show. On Friday he told listeners he doesn't know why "the government wouldn't just simply pay for [the center], considering the extraordinary amount of money they spend on ... this idiotic war." And later said "We have a tradition in this country, well, going back to the Civil War, in which we send off young people to fight these wars. Stuff happens to them. They lose their arms and legs. And we just discard them. You know, like they are iPods of old telephones or something."

One issue may be the number of wounded returning from America's two ongoing wars. "I don't think anybody in the world expected the numbers of wounded coming back [from Afghanistan and Iraq]," says Bill White, the Intrepid Fund's president. "In Vietnam, they would have died. And it's wonderful that they're alive, but they've survived catastrophic injuries that require them to get special help to rehabilitate." According to U.S Senate research, the amputation rate has doubled from previous wars to 6 percent of those injured. Since 2000, the demand for prosthetic services has increased more than 30 percent, and is now funded at $1 billion annually by the Department of Veterans Affairs.