Significant Injury: War, Medicine, and Empire in Claudia's Case

what it is to give birth, and basically I don't know what it is to have a child.All that I know is that I have a baby.She is my daughter.She is two years old.I talk to her every day.She says, 'Mommy,' because she sees pictures of me, but I don't know.I don't know" ("Doctors Scramble" 2006)."I only know I am married because of my wedding band" ("Claudia Carreon" 2006)."The notes and the pictures, those are my memory.When I look back, that's how I can tell what's real" (Alaimo 2006).Traumatic brain injury is estimated to account for a little over 19 percent of all injuries among U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (Tanielian and Jaycox 2008).A politically conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, reported in May 2007 that between January 2003 and March 2007, 2,130 military personnel were treated at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a joint venture between the departments of defense and veterans affairs based at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.About 70 percent of these cases were classified as mild TBI (Lengell 2007).A 2008 study funded by the California Community Foundation and conducted as a joint project of the RAND Health Division and the RAND National Security Research Division, reported that, of the approximately 1.64 million U.S. troops deployed to