WASHINGTON -- Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.
They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.
Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan's, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.
<follow link for the rest of the article, it's too long to post>
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Everyone complicit in this travesty should be in jail. Hell, send them to Gitmo.
I challenge the conservative bloggers and the Bush base to get all over their elected reps, and get these veterans the resources they need and deserve, lickety-freakin-split. Don't whine, don't attack the media, just get it done. If you can't even do that, then you support nothing, least of all "the troops."
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
I challenge the conservative bloggers and the Bush base to get all over their elected reps, and get these veterans the resources they need and deserve, lickety-freakin-split. Don't whine, don't attack the media, just get it done. If you can't even do that, then you support nothing, least of all "the troops."
While I agree with the idea of those who publically support the war being the leaders in getting this fixed, it's not just their responsibility to help the injured soldiers. That assertion turns their suffering into a partisian political weapon and that's a bit dispicable. Regardless of the morality of the war these kids are suffering and dying in ours hands (You just gotta love government run healthcare) and it's everyone's responsibility to help. I'm going to do some looking in local organizations that could help.
I challenge the conservative bloggers and the Bush base to get all over their elected reps, and get these veterans the resources they need and deserve, lickety-freakin-split. Don't whine, don't attack the media, just get it done. If you can't even do that, then you support nothing, least of all "the troops."
While I agree with the idea of those who publically support the war being the leaders in getting this fixed, it's not just their responsibility to help the injured soldiers. That assertion turns their suffering into a partisian political weapon and that's a bit dispicable. Regardless of the morality of the war these kids are suffering and dying in ours hands (You just gotta love government run healthcare) and it's everyone's responsibility to help. I'm going to do some looking in local organizations that could help.
That's not what he's saying. Those on the left ARE making noise about this issue, and ARE calling their congressional reps, and DO control the congress and have the power to fix this. Markos is merely saying that if the voices on the right don't DO THE SAME, then they have no right to criticize anyone else for not "supporting the troops".
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
'It Is Just Not Walter Reed' Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.
By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 5, 2007; A01
Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.
"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."
Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.
The official reaction to the revelations at Walter Reed has been swift, and it has exposed the potential political costs of ignoring Oliva's 24.3 million comrades -- America's veterans -- many of whom are among the last standing supporters of the Iraq war. In just two weeks, the Army secretary has been fired, a two-star general relieved of command and two special commissions appointed; congressional subcommittees are lining up for hearings, the first today at Walter Reed; and the president, in his weekly radio address, redoubled promises to do right by the all-volunteer force, 1.5 million of whom have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But much deeper has been the reaction outside Washington, including from many of the 600,000 new veterans who left the service after Iraq and Afghanistan. Wrenching questions have dominated blogs, talk shows, editorial cartoons, VFW spaghetti suppers and the solitary late nights of soldiers and former soldiers who fire off e-mails to reporters, members of Congress and the White House -- looking, finally, for attention and solutions.
Several forces converged to create this intense reaction. A new Democratic majority in Congress is willing to criticize the administration. Senior retired officers pounded the Pentagon with sharp questions about what was going on. Up to 40 percent of the troops fighting in Iraq are National Guard members and reservists -- "our neighbors," said Ron Glasser, a physician and author of a book about the wounded. "It all adds up and reaches a kind of tipping point," he said. On top of all that, America had believed the government's assurances that the wounded were being taken care of. "The country is embarrassed" to know otherwise, Glasser said.
The scandal has reverberated through generations of veterans. "It's been a potent reminder of past indignities and past traumas," said Thomas A. Mellman, a professor of psychiatry at Howard University who specializes in post-traumatic stress and has worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals. "The fact that it's been responded to so quickly has created mixed feelings -- gratification, but obvious regret and anger that such attention wasn't given before, especially for Vietnam veterans."
Across the country, some military quarters for wounded outpatients are in bad shape, according to interviews, Government Accountability Office reports and transcripts of congressional testimony. The mold, mice and rot of Walter Reed's Building 18 compose a familiar scenario for many soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan who were shipped to their home posts for treatment. Nearly 4,000 outpatients are currently in the military's Medical Holding or Medical Holdover companies, which oversee the wounded. Soldiers and veterans report bureaucratic disarray similar to Walter Reed's: indifferent, untrained staff; lost paperwork; medical appointments that drop from the computers; and long waits for consultations.
Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.
"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"
Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."
Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.
From Fort Campbell in Kentucky: "There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos."
From Fort Bragg in North Carolina: "They are on my [expletive] like a diaper. . . . there are people getting chewed up everyday."
From Fort Dix in New Jersey: "Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs."
From Fort Irwin in California: "Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards."
Soldiers back from Iraq worry that their psychological problems are only beginning to surface. "The hammer is just coming down, I can feel it," said retired Maj. Anthony DeStefano of New Jersey, describing his descent into post-traumatic stress and the Army's propensity to medicate rather than talk. When he returned home, Army doctors put him on the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. "That way, you can screw their lights out and they won't feel a thing," he said of patients like himself. "By the time they understand what is going on, they are through the Board and stuck with an unfavorable percentage of disability" benefits.
Nearly 64,000 of the more than 184,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have sought VA health care have been diagnosed with potential symptoms of post-traumatic stress, drug abuse or other mental disorders as of the end of June, according to the latest report by the Veterans Health Administration. Of those, nearly 30,000 have possible post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said.
VA hospitals are also receiving a surge of new patients after more than five years of combat. At the sprawling James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., Spec. Roberto Reyes Jr. lies nearly immobile and unable to talk. Once a strapping member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Reyes got too close to an improvised explosive device in Iraq and was sent to Walter Reed, where doctors did all they could before shipping him to the VA for the remainder of his life. A cloudy bag of urine hangs from his wheelchair. His mother and his aunt are constant bedside companions; Reyes, 25, likes for them to get two inches from his face, so he can pull on their noses with the few fingers he can still control.
Maria Mendez, his aunt, complained about the hospital staff. "They fight over who's going to have to give him a bath -- in front of him!" she said. Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water. His aunt found out only later, when she saw the burns.
Among the most aggrieved are veterans who have lived with the open secret of substandard, underfunded care in the 154 VA hospitals and hundreds of community health centers around the country. They vented their fury in thousands of e-mails and phone calls and in chat rooms.
"I have been trying to get someone, ANYBODY, to look into my allegations" at the Dayton VA, pleaded Darrell Hampton.
"I'm calling from Summerville, South Carolina, and I have a story to tell," began Horace Williams, 62. "I'm a Marine from the Vietnam era, and it took me 20 years to get the benefits I was entitled to."
The VA has a backlog of 400,000 benefit claims, including many concerning mental health. Vietnam vets whose post-traumatic stress has been triggered by images of war in Iraq are flooding the system for help and are being turned away.
For years, politicians have received letters from veterans complaining of bad care across the country. Last week, Walter Reed was besieged by members of Congress who toured the hospital and Building 18 to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions. Many of them have been visiting patients in the hospital for years, but now they are issuing news releases decrying the mistreatment of the wounded.
Sgt. William A. Jones had recently written to his Arizona senators complaining about abuse at the VA hospital in Phoenix. He had written to the president before that. "Not one person has taken the time to respond in any manner," Jones said in an e-mail.
From Ray Oliva, the distraught 70-year-old vet from Kelseyville, Calif., came this: "I wrote a letter to Senators Feinstein and Boxer a few years ago asking why I had to wear Hospital gowns that had holes in them and torn and why some of the Vets had to ask for beds that had good mattress instead of broken and old. Wheel chairs old and tired and the list goes on and on. I never did get a response."
Oliva lives in a house on a tranquil lake. His hearing is shot from working on fighter jets on the flight line. "Gun plumbers," as they called themselves, didn't get earplugs in the late 1950s, when Oliva served with the Air Force. His hands had been burned from touching the skin of the aircraft. All is minor compared with what he later saw at the VA hospital where he received care.
"I sat with guys who'd served in 'Nam," Oliva said. "We had terrible problems with the VA. But we were all so powerless to do anything about them. Just like Walter Reed."
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 1:14 am Posts: 37778 Location: OmaGOD!!! Gender: Male
Could have put this in the lol c_b thread, but I think it's more significant than that, and it concerns the FoxNews TV network, not the website specifically.
OTB is a right-leaning, but usually pretty thoughtful and non-dogmatic blog site.
Fox News Coverage of Anna Nicole and Walter Reed
By James Joyner
Nico Pitney at Think Progress breathlessly reports that, “Fox News Devoted 12 Times More Coverage To Anna Nicole Than Walter Reed†on March 2.
My extensive research reveals that Perez Hilton got 7.5 times the traffic of Daily Kos last week. For those who don’t know, those are the most popular gossip and political blogs on the Web. For added context, there are eleven other gossip blogs which get more traffic than Kos.
Using these data points, I’m going to make a big deductive leap: People care more about titillating celebrity gossip than they do about military hospital conditions. While perhaps shocking, that’s reality.
As I’ve noted numerous times before, the business of the media is business. That FOX is devoting most of its airtime to stories that it thinks will get people to watch the advertisements that are the raison d’être of broadcast television should not be surprising.
Pitney makes a fair point, though, in noting the different ratios of FOX and its competitors:
NETWORK ANNA NICOLE WALTER REED
FOX NEWS 121 10
MSNBC 96 84
CNN 40 53
Now, there are multiple explanations for this. First, FOX might just be more likely to focus its news coverage to those things it thinks the audience will watch. Second, the relative Right-ward slant of FOX and Left-ward slant of the other two could explain part of this. Third, the counting methodology is flawed.
My guess is that all three are true.
Given that they’re number one in the ratings, it seems quite plausible that FOX programs soft news over hard news more than the other cable news networks. Frankly, I haven’t watched any of them much the last two or three years but I know, for example, that Greta Van Sustern’s program became the “Natalie Holloway Show†for months on end.
Nor would it surprise me that FOX would underplay a story that would make the administration look bad while CNN and MSNBC would do the opposite. That would be playing to type.
I suspect there’s some coding bias here, too. I’ve sent an email to Think Progress for an explanation, but I can’t imagine that FOX didn’t mention the story dozens of times that day in some shape or form. It may well be that the selection frame unfairly (even if intentionally) skewed the results in favor of CNN.
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
broken iris wrote:
Hell, send them to Gitmo.
... and give them better accomodations than the soldiers in their care?
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Bathesda's not like that. I have two real good friends that work at Bathesda and the place is eternally being visited by senators. The commandant visits Bathesda once a week. I have absolutely no idea what on earth went wrong at Walter Reed, but it makes me sick.
My VA in Rochester is top notch too. Brand new facilities, waits were short, and the people were amazingly friendly and helpful. I must say, that my personal VA experience is very good. However, I have definitely heard horror stories, even from VA's in the WNY area.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
... If this is the medical care our wounded soldiers from the Middle East receive from a government-run health care system, what makes you think that the care you are going to receive under "universal health care" is going to be any better?
Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:54 am Posts: 7189 Location: CA
If I recall correctly, France had the worst health care and survival rates for its wounded during World War I than any other western country, and it was fighting on home turf. This is definitely not one thing I'd like to say that we out do the French at.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
corky wrote:
crappy health care > no health care
Tell that to the girl who was killed by getting the wrong heart at Duke Hospital.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
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