The Washington Post Discovers Shrapnel, But Not Body Armor

Who knew that shrapnel wounds cause grievous bodily damage to soldiers? Anyone who has gone to war since Henry Shrapnel invented the technology more than 200 years ago.

When U.S. service members or civilians such as Bob Woodruff of ABC News get injured or killed in Iraq, official accounts often blame roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But many times it's the searing hot, sharp-edged, comes-in-all-sizes shards of metal and debris known as shrapnel that actually cause the wounds.

Walter Reed is full of soldiers whose bodies are riddled with shrapnel. Many carry around the fragments doctors have left inside them, to work their way out over time. Removing embedded shrapnel, doctors say, can do more harm than good. And the body can "tolerate it fairly well," said Col. Russell Martin, the general surgeon consultant to the Army surgeon general.

This is apparently news to the Washington Post, which thinks it newsworthy that US soldiers are coming home with shrapnel wounds that would simply amaze and astound a casual observer as to how they'd survive the wounds in the first place.

The fact is that more soldiers are coming home with shrapnel wounds because of things like Interceptor body armor and other protective devices that weren't available to earlier generations of soldiers. Medical advances also mean more soldiers come home alive, though scarred from their injuries.

That's the rub of the article. It talks of shrapnel in a vacuum. It makes no mention of how and why these soldiers are coming home to tell their stories.