Dehydration In Iraq

The big story coming out of Iraq right now isn't about insurgents, or road side bombs; it's about our soldiers not getting enough water. If you want a war in the desert, you can provide your guys with the best weapons and technology available, but if you can't get them clean water to drink and enough of it, you've got big problems. Apparently, we've got big problems.

In some instances, some soldiers in Iraq were forced to ration water to 2-3 liters a day. This was in a place where a human being can lose up to 15 liters a day. Do you think you could survive in 130 degree heat on less than a gallon of water a day? I wouldn't want to try.

In some cases, in desperation, soldiers took water from the civilian population and no, it wasn't clean. Lots of soldiers got dysentery and no telling what all kinds of other disease from doing that. Soldiers were getting sick from the contaminated water and also getting kidney stones from not drinking enough water. Some even found out that the sinks and showers were pouring out untreated wastewater that was 2-3 times more contaminated than untreated water directly out of the Euphrates River.

So what was the problem? The army has water trucks that are used to supply soldiers with water. However, they are in short supply and even when they are around, the chemicals used to treat the water makes it hard to drink. In other cases, military contractor, KBR, was in charge of supplying our troops with water and just failed to do so.

(SOURCE)

This war has been a big, dumb mistake from the start. They should never have went, or at least should have been home long ago. We all know that soldiers have a horribly tough job and it's not comfortable, or safe. However, as long as our chicken hawk politicians want to keep these men and women over there, can we at least make sure we get them some clean fucking water?