Military preventable wrongful deaths
USA- Rollcall.com writes that a shocking number of military deaths are caused by preventable training accidents. In fact, a report published by the Congressional Research Service earlier this month stated that nearly one in three active-duty fatalities that occurred in the United States Military from 2006 through 2018 were the result of training accidents.
In 2017, the number of deadly training accidents was close to four times as high as the number of deaths that occurred in combat.
One of the issues being investigated is rollover crashes.
The mother of one of the victims stated that her son died in a rollover crash in South Korea during a test. The 20-year-old did not make it to a trauma center for about two hours, largely due to problems with emergency vehicles and equipment.
The young soldier’s mother points out that there are 42,000 servicemembers at stationed at the South Korean base, along with many of their families. She wanted to know how it is possible that there were no hospitals or access to hospitals from their location.
One of the problems that prevented timely medical care was that the helicopter sent to the scene became lost and took 80 minutes to arrive. A second medevac helicopter was sent, but would not start. A Korean ambulance arrived on the scene but did not have any surgical equipment. Those medical workers ran out of oxygen before the delayed helicopter arrived.
If passed, an amendment to the policy would require that military study better ways in which respond to emergencies. Such a study is typically performed before funding is allocated to a cause. Still, such work would only address part of the problem leading to the high number of tragic training accidents.
