I remember, several years ago, seeing “Born on the Fourth of July,” and watching Tom Cruise’s character, who had been seriously wounded in Vietnam, come back to the U.S., only to get stuck and mistreated in a rat-infested veterans hospital. Cruise was disgusted. “This place is a fu**in’ slum!” he’d say.
The movie was fiction, but those surroundings really existed for far too many veterans of the war in Vietnam. Fortunately, that was a generation ago. We’re supposed to have learned valuable lessons from that conflict and its aftermath, and there’s no way the United States could tolerate such shoddy treatment of its wounded combat veterans again.
Except we are, it’s happening right now, and it’s nothing short of a national disgrace.
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.
Reading about the conditions in which these heroes are living is heartbreaking.
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. What they found should shock the country.
While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.
On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of “Catch-22.” The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.
Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers’ families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.
“We’ve done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it,” said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. “We don’t know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don’t have the answers.”
The problem is not the medical care, per se, which is widely considered excellent. The problem is with what the patients experience afterwards, as outpatients. The troops are promised good care in return for their sacrifices, but as the Post found, many are given mouse traps for their infested living quarters.
“I’ve been close to mortars. I’ve held my own pretty good,” said Spec. George Romero, 25, who came back from Iraq with a psychological disorder. “But here . . . I think it has affected my ability to get over it . . . dealing with potential threats every day.” Romero added, “I hate it. There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn’t work. The garage door doesn’t work. Sometimes there’s no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, ‘Suck it up!’ ”
Think about this: the United States sent these young people into an unnecessary war without the equipment they needed to keep them safe. Once injured, the United States sticks them in disgusting environments so they can “recover.” This is how we honor their service and thank them for a job well done.
The president, during his last visit to Walter Reed in December, said, “We owe them all we can give them. Not only for when they’re in harm’s way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service.”
His words would be laughable if it weren’t so painful.
Our friends on the other side of the aisle like to talk a lot about “supporting the troops.” They say draft-dodgers like Bush and Cheney are trustworthy because they care about those who serve, while Democrats don’t really support the troops, because they don’t blindly support their misguided mission.
The next time some GOP hack even uses the phrase “support the troops,” remember this article. In fact, send him or her a copy and ask why the administration allows this to continue.
Please find time today to read the whole thing.