This sounds like what saved your step-brother. Typical Army procurement. Never changes. What do you want to bet that the REMF's in Quwait have the armor? I remember reading the after action articles from the A Teams in Afghanistan who said the armor for them was short-stopped at the Div level and it took major action to get it delivered.
washingtonpost.com
Body Armor Saves Lives in Iraq
Pentagon Criticized for Undersupply of Protective Vests
By Vernon Loeb and Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 4, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- Pfc. Gregory Stovall felt the explosion on his face. He was standing in the turret of a Humvee, manning a machine gun, when the roadside bomb went off. At the time, he was guarding a convoy of trucks making a mail run.
In an instant, Stovall's face was perforated by shrapnel, the index finger on his right hand was gone, and the middle finger was hanging by a tendon. But the 22-year-old from Brooklyn remembers instinctively reaching for his chest and stomach -- "to make sure everything was there," he said.
It was, encased in a Kevlar vest reinforced by boron carbide ceramic plates that are so hard they can stop AK-47 rounds traveling 2,750 feet per second.
Thus, on the morning of Nov. 4, Stovall became the latest in a long line of soldiers serving in Iraq to be saved by the U.S. military's new Interceptor body armor.
This high-tech "system" -- the Kevlar vest and "small-arms protective inserts," which the troops call SAPI plates -- is dramatically reducing the kind of torso injuries that have killed soldiers on the battlefield in wars past.
Soldiers will not patrol without the armor -- if they can get it. But as of now, there is not enough to go around. Going into the war in Iraq, the Army decided to outfit only dismounted combat soldiers with the plated vests, which cost about $1,500 each. But when Iraqi insurgents began ambushing convoys and killing clerks as well as combat troops, controversy erupted.
Last month, Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) and 102 other House members wrote to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to demand hearings on why the Pentagon had been unable to provide all U.S. service members in Iraq with the latest body armor. In the letter, the lawmakers cited reports that soldiers' parents had been purchasing body armor with ceramic plates and sending it to their children in Iraq.
The demand came after Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command and commander of all military forces in Iraq, told a House Appropriations subcommittee in September that he could not "answer for the record why we started this war with protective vests that were in short supply."
With the armor, "it's the difference between being hit with a fist or with a knife," said Ben Gonzalez, chief of the emergency room at the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, the largest U.S. Army hospital in the country, which treats the majority of wounded soldiers.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, began investigating the Army's decision not to equip all troops deploying to Iraq with Interceptor body armor after learning that one of his students, reservist Richard Murphy, was in the country with a Vietnam-era flak jacket.
"There's been an overwhelming effort to get the military every possible resource," Turley said. "To have such an item denied to troops in Iraq was a terrible oversight."
Since he began publicizing the lack of body armor, Turley said, he has been deluged with e-mails from people offering to donate body armor to U.S. troops.
Joe Werfelman, the father of Turley's student, said he was dismayed to learn that his son had been sent to Iraq in May without ceramic plates. "He called us frantically three or four times on this," Werfelman said in an interview. "We said, 'If the Army is not going to protect him, we've got to do it.' "
So Werfelman, of Scotia, Pa., found a New Jersey company that had the ceramic plates in stock, plunked down $660 for two plates and a carrying case, and sent them to his son. "As far as I know, he's still using the ones that we got him," he said. "Some units have the new plates and some units don't."
At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 19, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the committee's chairman, told acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee that the shortage of body armor in Iraq was "totally unacceptable."
"Now, where was the error -- and I say it's an error made in planning -- to send those troops to forward-deployed regions, and the conflict in Iraq, without adequate numbers of body armor?" Warner asked.
"Events since the end of major combat operations in Iraq have differed from our expectations and have combined to cause problems," Brownlee said.
Before approving the administration's $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress added hundreds of millions of dollars for more body armor, armored Humvees, and other systems to protect soldiers from roadside bombs and ambushes.
Now, three manufacturers are working overtime to produce the 80,000 vests and 160,000 plates required to outfit everyone in Iraq by the end of the year. Assembly lines are producing 25,000 sets a month.
Commanders say the vests are changing the way soldiers think and act in combat. "I will tell you that the soldiers -- to include this one -- experience some degree of feeling a little indestructible, particularly in light of the fact that we have seen the equipment work," said Lt. Col. Henry Arnold, a battalion commander and combat veteran in the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq.
"It's a security blanket," Stovall said from his hospital bed, awaiting a medevac flight to Germany with his hand bandaged. "If only they had a glove, I might have my finger, but I'm thankful that I'm here."
The product of a five-year military research effort aimed at reducing the weight and cost of the plates while increasing their strength, the body armor made its combat debut last year in Afghanistan and was credited with saving more than a dozen lives during Operation Anaconda.
The camouflage Kevlar vest, which alone can stop rounds from a 9mm handgun, weighs 8.4 pounds, while each of the plates weighs 4 pounds. At 16.4 pounds, Interceptor body armor is a third lighter than the 25-pound flak jacket from the Vietnam era, but it provides far more protection.
Consider the case of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division.
During a foot patrol in Fallujah in late September, an Iraqi insurgent suddenly emerged from an alleyway and fired an AK-47 at Spec. John Fox from point-blank range. Fox was hit in the stomach as he returned fire, and the blast knocked him off his feet. The bullet hit the middle of three ammunition magazines hanging from the front of his Kevlar vest, igniting tracer rounds and setting off a smoke grenade. A thick gray plume poured from his vest where he lay.
His squad mates, having shot and killed the gunman, rushed to his side. "Am I bleeding? Am I bleeding?" they recalled Fox asking.
They checked and discovered he was unharmed. His body armor had protected him not only from the AK-47 round but also from his own exploding munitions.
"Fox must have been only 10, 15 meters from this guy," recalled Sgt. Roger Vasquez. "And this thing stopped the bullet."
A month later, two of those who had rushed to Fox's side, Spec. Sean Bargmann and Spec. Joseph Rodriguez, were on a mounted patrol in Fallujah, sitting atop a Humvee, when a powerful roadside bomb exploded just feet away.
"It felt like somebody took a Louisville Slugger to my head," Bargmann said.
Weeks after the attack, he and Rodriguez still bore the outlines of their armor: The tops of their heads, protected by their Kevlar helmets, and their torsos, protected by their body armor, were unscathed. But Bargmann had a deep cut right below the helmet line, and Rodriguez had three scars running down his right cheek and a scar above his left eye.
This often happens with body armor: Lives are saved, but faces, arms and legs are punctured and scarred. Doctors are treating serious wounds to the extremities that are creating large numbers of amputees -- soldiers who in earlier wars never would have made it off the battlefield.
Gonzalez, the doctor at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, is not complaining about the number of amputations. "The survival rate has increased significantly," he said. "In the past, you'd see head and chest and abdominal injuries. They would die even before they got to me."
Sgt. Gary Frisbee of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment remembers standing in the turret of a Humvee waiting to die. His vehicle was bringing up the rear during a routine three-vehicle patrol in Sadr City, Baghdad's vast Shiite slum, when hundreds of armed followers of the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr opened fire on them with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
"I knew it was all over; it was just a matter of when," he recalled. "You're bracing yourself, because you're just waiting for the bullet to hit you. The volume of AK fire was unreal, from the roofs, in front of you, and behind you."
Two of 10 soldiers on the patrol were killed; four were wounded.
During the battle, Frisbee felt something hit the back of his Kevlar vest but kept on fighting. When the smoke finally cleared, he pulled out the back plate to see what had happened and found a bullet hole.
It had been, as he had thought, just a matter of time. He had been hit -- and saved by boron carbide.
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