William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

You know all that rhetoric about “supporting the troops” and “emboldening the enemy”? One must wonder how exactly the U.S. government is supporting the military when real, tangible stories come out.

This isn’t a hypothetical situation. This is real life. And in real life, George Bush and his PNAC crowd, along with everyone else in Congress, do not care one bit about the human fodder they feed the war machine.

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility

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.

…
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.

…

“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.”

What others are saying

“This Administration, Congressional Republicans, Joe Lieberman, and any American that still supports this war are worthy of nothing but our contempt and disgust. You want to talk about genocide and brutality towards an entire group of people? The Republicans in Washington are committing genocide against an entire class of Americans — those idealistic, or foolish, enough to believe that when they volunteered to serve their country, their Commander-in-Chief would give a shit about them.”

–Brilliant at Breakfast

“This is beyond sickening. We have to sit back and listen to GOP members of Congress, George Bush’s White House, and that pig General Petraeus dare to tell us how WE’RE the ones turning our backs on the troops, when all three of them knew this was going on under their watch and none of them lifted a finger to fix it.

Our soldiers were lied to about this war, they were lied to about their enlistment, they were never given a plan for victory or the numbers of troops they needed, they still don’t have the armor they need for their vehicles. And now, the young men and women wounded and maimed for our country are living in government-run pig-stys not fit for farm animals. The American Taliban and the detainees in Guantanamo get better conditions than this, all courtesy of the Republicans.

–America Blog

“But these wounded are not the only warriors who are suffering right now. We have had roughly 1.4 million troops rotate through the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have rotated through mobilizations since Sept. 11, 2001. Our military will likely remain engaged in these wars for the foreseeable future, and hundreds of thousands more will rotate through these two theaters. Yet despite these operational facts, the VA budget continues to atrophy. Veterans seeking disability ratings must wait between 6-12 months to receive an adjudication. Veterans without a service-connected disability rating who do not meet a stringent “means test” may be excluded from the system entirely. Although the VA has been rated as the nation’s finest medical system, it increasingly cannot deliver that care to the population it exists to serve. Why?”

–Intel Dump

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Through it all, warmonger pundits, entertainers and government hangers on, will blather incessantly over how the U.S. is in a battle for its very existence.

Yet they cut taxes. They refuse to speak of a draft. They ask for no sacrifice from average Americans. They send our troops into war zones with inadequate armor. They send too few of our troops into a war. And then when our troops come home severely broken, they shit on them.

That there’s still roughly 30 percent of the U.S. that believe Bush is fighting some valiant war is beyond belief and screams of a piss-poor education system. PNAC has spent six years making the U.S. a haven for war profiteers. While making it a living hell to be an honest soldier.

Catch on people. Because while you sit around wondering why “moderate” Muslims aren’t holding “extremist” Muslims in check, the rest of the world, and future history books, are wondering how the U.S. fells so far and became such a massive group of savages, and why average Americans have let it all happen, if not cheered it on.

–WKW

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.