After three years of eye injuries to troops in the Middle East, the Department of Defense is beginning a program to provide military members headed downrange with standardized combat eye protection.
Deploying units will now receive either Oakley or Uvex sunglasses and a set of ESS land ops goggles. DOD will pay for the specs, which retail from between $50 to $80 a pair.
Previously, units were responsible to provide their own eye protection, using discretionary funds, said Col. C. David Vesely, chief of Landstuhl Regional Medical Center’s optometry section in Germany.
The program aims, in part, to reduce the number of eye injuries by offering the best available protection to all soldiers.
“Prior to the program, there wasn’t a lot of standardization. Some were better than others,” Vesely said.
Many soldiers in Iraq have favored a brand of sunglasses called Wiley-X, with high-impact polycarbonate lenses, and Army opthalmologists serving in Iraq — who performed surgery on 100 injured eyes and surgically removed 40 eyes — encouraged their use.
But soldiers noted that they fogged up during exertion. And Wiley-Xs with corrective lenses were prone to shattering, Vesely said.
The Oakleys have been popular for some time. According to the Special Operations Technology Web site, one officer near the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign wrote the following e-mail: “We need 10,000 rounds for AK-47s, 5,000 rounds for M-16s, 10 pounds of oats for the horses, a saddle, a bridle and Oakley sunglasses.”
Soldiers who don’t wear glasses will get the Oakleys. Soldiers who wear corrective lenses will be issued the Uvex sunglasses, which have a corrective insert.
The goggles come in two models: one to wear over glasses, one to wear alone. Soldiers are prohibited from wearing contact lenses when deployed. Some 70 soldiers who wore them in Iraq nonetheless had to be treated for corneal ulcers, according to Maj. Steven Brady, Landstuhl’s ophthalmology chief.
The new eye protection program is beginning as the Army is making another push to ensure soldiers’ “visual readiness” to deploy.
That new program makes commanders responsible for seeing that their soldiers have had an eye exam annually and are fitted with whatever corrective lenses are necessary.
“It’s going to require [the] commander to monitor vision readiness,” Vesely said.
Under the new rules, soldiers who haven’t been screened within a year, or who don’t have the eyeglasses they need and have vision worse than 20-40 are considered not deployable, Vesely said.
The idea is to avoid what’s happened in the past, Vesely said: a scramble just a few weeks before deployment for thousands of sets of glasses to be made. In the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, he said, optical labs struggled to fill an 88 percent increase in glasses formulations.
“It doesn’t help the soldier downrange if his glasses are in Frankfurt (Germany),” he said. “We’re putting soldiers in harm’s way that had difficulty seeing.”
