H
Harry Hope
Guest
From The Washington Post, 3/5/07:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030401394.html
'It Is Just Not Walter Reed'
Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.
By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 5, 2007; Page A01
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 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, Darrell Hampton pleaded.
"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.
________________________________________________________
Makes ya wanna vomit.
Harry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030401394.html
'It Is Just Not Walter Reed'
Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.
By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 5, 2007; Page A01
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 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, Darrell Hampton pleaded.
"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.
________________________________________________________
Makes ya wanna vomit.
Harry
