nhboy
08-19-2007, 11:25 AM
For some time now there has been a number of negative reports, which may or may not be accurate, regarding the care America provides its wounded warriors. but consider the following footnote from the book, A Writer At War, Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Grossman is highly regarded as being one of the very few Russian war correspondents who reported truthfully about the war in Russia.
"The prospect of becoming mutilated or becoming a cripple always represented a greater fear for Soviet soldiers than being killed. There was of course the unshakable belief that a women would never want to look at them again. This may have been a misleading male nightmare, but the true awfulness of their fate did not become apparent until after the war when maimed and crippled Red Army soldiers were treated with unbelievable callousness by the Soviet authorities. Those reduced to a trunk with stumps were known as samovars. After the war they were rounded up and sent to towns in the Arctic circle so that the Soviet capital would not be made unsightly with limbless veterans"
"The prospect of becoming mutilated or becoming a cripple always represented a greater fear for Soviet soldiers than being killed. There was of course the unshakable belief that a women would never want to look at them again. This may have been a misleading male nightmare, but the true awfulness of their fate did not become apparent until after the war when maimed and crippled Red Army soldiers were treated with unbelievable callousness by the Soviet authorities. Those reduced to a trunk with stumps were known as samovars. After the war they were rounded up and sent to towns in the Arctic circle so that the Soviet capital would not be made unsightly with limbless veterans"