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Why hero who lost limbs is not on minister's list of Iraq war injured Gethin Chamberlain Chief News Correspondent 25 March 2006, The Scotsman A SOLDIER awarded the George Cross after he lost an arm and a leg in a bomb blast in Iraq has not been counted as injured by the Ministry of Defence - because he was treated by American medics. Captain Peter Norton was injured while operating with US troops near Baghdad on 24 July last year. A roadside bomb killed four US soldiers, injured several others and wrecked their Humvee vehicle. Attempting to tackle a second bomb contained in two 155mm artillery shells, Capt Norton triggered a second explosion, hurling him 15ft into the air. He lost 84 pints of blood. Yesterday, the MoD confirmed that he was treated at a US medical facility in Baghdad and then flown straight back to the UK. As a result, he does not feature on the official tally of 230 British wounded released by John Reid in January. Ironically, it was as a result of pressure from Capt Norton's wife, Sue, that Mr Reid finally agreed to publish some figures for British wounded. She had complained that the government was not being open about the number of soldiers who were being injured in Iraq as a result of the ongoing conflict. But when Mr Reid did eventually come up with a figure, it fell fall far short of a true picture of the casualties sustained by British forces since the start of the war. The figure of 230 wounded includes - at most - only 24 soldiers wounded in action during the war itself. That is because the figures released by Mr Reid relate only to the Shaibah field hospital outside Basra, which was not operational until the final days of the fighting. Instead, most of the British casualties were treated at other field hospitals, which later shut down and returned to the UK. The MoD claims that it did not keep a record of soldiers treated by those hospitals, nor did it keep a record of injuries treated by the soldiers' own units. Nor, according to a statement on its own website, did it follow its own procedures for the reporting of casualty statistics. The result is the government claims to have no idea how many soldiers have actually been injured in action since the start of the war in March 2003, and the MoD repeatedly has refused to go back through its files to establish the true figure. An MoD spokeswoman said: "The 230 figure provided only relates to our people who were injured in enemy combat and treated in the Shaibah field hospital. At the moment we simply don't have figures for all personnel who were treated by their unit medic, or coalition medics, or otherwise. Our priority has not been to dedicate staff to compiling these statistics." Mr Reid - who said the actions of Capt Norton and others who received gallantry medals in the latest round of awards filled him with "a great sense of humility and pride" - pledged in January that the MoD would in future provide a monthly breakdown of casualties, which it has now published. However, it has made no attempt to correct the erroneous figure for previous casualties. He acted after Mrs Norton went public with her criticisms of government secrecy, complaining about the refusal to provide accurate figures. "The government here should be more open," she said at the time. She said news of injuries to British soldiers was not made public. "They are the forgotten ones... This is the hidden human cost, and we should have more information about what is done in our name." The MoD now has published its estimate of total casualty figures, along with the number of casualties sustained in January this year. It revealed that five UK personnel were injured in January as a result of hostile action, one seriously and one very seriously. It repeated the 230 figure for previous injuries, explaining that it only includes soldiers treated at the Shaibah field hospital and "does not include UK forces that were treated at coalition (for example, United States) facilities". It also explains that some injuries may not have been reported during the war "in the heat of the action" and that it no longer has records for the other major field hospitals.
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