And while we're on the subject of veterans ...
Please read this story in Sunday's Washington Post about Walter Reed Army Hospital.
This story raises a complicated set of issues that would be very easy to misunderstand.
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. It's a nonstop process of stalling."
To be scrupulously fair, none -- repeat, none -- of the dozens of veterans I've talked to since beginning reporting on veterans issues in September has complained about the skill or the dedication of the staff at the two VA facilities with which they most often interact, the hospitals at Salisbury and Durham. Not even anonymously.
Some have, however, expressed concern about whether those facilities are getting the financial and administrative support those units need to serve our veterans the way they need and deserve to be served. It appears the same concerns are warranted for the Other Walter Reed.
UPDATE: It's a series, and another installment is here. Hat tip to my colleague Robert Bell for the heads-up.
UPDATE: The head of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, says the Post is wrong, lying or both. Well, anything's possible. Really. I'm not being snarky here.
But I'm also not being snarky when I suggest that there are at least two other possible explanations, poor administration or failure to secure adequate resources, either of which fits better with Occam's razor than does Weightman's version of events. Meanwhile, I'm awaiting more info.