"I hate it. There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water." Comments from George Romero, an Iraq veteran and outpatient at Walter Reed Hospital, the premier military hospital in this country. He's speaking of the outpatient section of the hospital, which, judging from a Washington Post article by Dana Priest and Anne Hull, is a virtual hell on earth.
The outpatients need further treatment or - and this is what really gets me - bureaucrats have to produce the paperwork enabling them to leave the hospital. Some are there for months on end awaiting release. Sgt. Ryan Groves, who was at Walter Reed for sixteen months, says, "The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling." A mother who spent over a year with her son at Walter Reed has a similar comment, "It just absolutely took forever to get anything done. They do the paperwork, they lose the paperwork. Then they have to redo the paperwork. You are talking about guys and girls whose lives are disrupted for the rest of their lives, and they don't put any priority on it."
To enter and leave the world of Walter Reed, soldiers have to file 22 documents with 8 different commands. It takes 16 different IT systems to process the documents but communication between these systems is non-existent. And records get lost. One soldier, with an eye patch and a skull implant, had to bring his purple heart to prove he had been in Iraq.
But, hey, this is the army and you have to be in uniform no matter what your condition. That's why the hospital has break-away clothing with velcro.
Hell, we couldn't supply the troops with enough equipment when they were there. Now, we can't even get rid of rats in the soldiers' rooms. But we can spend billions on weapons that may never see the light of day. What's wrong with this picture?
1 comment:
From that same article: "Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander at Walter Reed, said in an interview last week that a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, "because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution.""
Keeping the numbers up hardly seems a good reason for a) keeping soldiers away from their homes for so long, and b) allowing the building to fall down around them.
Like you, I try to maintain an obscenity-free blog, but there are times it just isn't possible!
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