Jim Cohen
Staff Writer
An investigative report by the Washington Post reveals America’s top military medical facility, Washington D.C.’s Walter Reed Army Hospital, has failed to live up to its promise of offering the best care to our nation’s wounded servicemen and women.
The report details the anguish of hundreds of soldiers receiving medical rehabilitation treatment from the facility. With horrible living conditions and a bureaucratic backlog preventing combat veterans from receiving proper counseling and disability benefits, quiet outrage has turned into an all-out warfare of anger due to this disgusting treatment.
The account of Army Spec. Sgt. Jeremy Duncan’s care displays the origin of outrage for many of the complaints listed in the Washington Post expose. While staying at Walter Reed for treatment and rehabilitation of a broken neck and shattered left ear, Sgt. Duncan lived in a room with torn walls engulfed in black mold.
The Iraq war veteran and Army engineer showers in the morning with an unpleasant view of the bathtub from the floor above caused by a gaping rotted hole in his ceiling. The smell of greasy carryout food with the sight of mouse droppings, dead cockroaches, stained carpets and cheap mattresses replace Duncan’s morning cup of coffee with a jolt of despair.
Serving mostly maimed and injured Army combat soldiers, Walter Reed Hospital claims to offer the best direct medical treatment in the world. Medical treatment has been so successful during the past five-and-a-half years of America’s war on terrorism, the number of outpatients receiving rehabilitation services, like that of Duncan, outnumber in-bed medical patients 17-to-1. Unable to handle the influx of patients needing rehabilitation services after surgery, Walter Reed has become a graveyard for physically and psychologically damaged veterans
trying to assimilate into society.
Some soldiers have remained at the hospital for up to two years as they try to navigate a disastrous bureaucratic process waiting to be cleared for active duty or honorably discharged. A lack of resources, personnel and proper management of the facility has put soldiers with psychological disorders in charge of rehabilitative care for other soldiers. Some disappear from the facility without a trace, and others leave for home in utter despondence.
Before they can begin rehabilitation treatment, soldiers are required to fill out 22 different forms with 8 different command posts to receive disability benefits, many of which are off-campus from the hospital and force soldiers to spend hours on the phone or try to physically carry themselves to each location. It is also common for forms regarding their rehabilitation to end up lost, delaying their treatment.
The inability of the Army’s medical databases to communicate with one another has made accessing medical and billing information arduous and complicated.
News reports from the Army Times and Newsweek account for soldiers being denied or awarded lower monetary disability benefits for their injuries in order to save costs while leaving 500 to 1,000 veterans homeless with no place to go for guidance and help.
The lack of care and treatment our wounded veterans have received from Walter Reed Hospital is despicable and outrageous. It is even more despicable that since the report has been made public, not one person in charge of care at the hospital has been fired for their neglect.
It is even more outrageous that since the report has been made public, President Bush has failed to personally comment on the situation. Bush is responsible for sending our brave soldiers into combat. One would think he would have a comment about the grave situation and neglect our wounded veterans face at Walter Reed.
It is confusing why Pres. Bush refuses to comment on the situation at Walter Reed after he made every attempt to chastise his former presidential rival, Senator John Kerry, D-Mass., during the 2006 midterm elections, for making a botched joke that was supposed to be about the president and instead sounded like a botched joke about our nation’s soldiers.
Bush voiced his anger and outrage toward Kerry, demanding the senator apologize to our troops for his verbal mistake while he questioned his commitment to our veterans— despite knowing Kerry himself is a veteran.
If a botched joke about soldiers angered the president so much, it seems the physical and psychological ill treatment of our soldiers have received at Walter Reed would infuriate him, yet he remains silent. Bush could certainly fire those responsible for this mistreatment, but he has done nothing.
Bush’s lack of response to the conditions at Walter Reed proves he has been more interested in scoring tasteless political points against his opponents while the troops he sends into battle receive tasteless medical care under his administration.
The number one job of the commander in chief is to take care of the soldiers he sends into battle, and Bush has failed to do this. Bush’s inclination to use war as a political tool has resulted in a dereliction of duty that has left our troops without a leader who cares.
It is Bush who owes our troops an apology.
03-01-2007