COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
'It Is Just Not Walter Reed'
Anne Hull and Dana Priest, Washington Post
March 5, 2007
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."
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