[Dialogue] Wounded Vets Trade One Hell for Another

Wed Jan 16 19:49:53 EST 2008

Published on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 by Inter Press Service
<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40797>  

Wounded Vets Trade One Hell for Another

by Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO - Last year, the United States woke up to the reality of
hundreds of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan - and
began to grapple with what to do about it.
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On Feb. 18, 2007, a headline titled "Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at
Army's Top Medical Facility" splashed across the front page of one of the
nation's premier newspapers, the Washington Post. The article, which
described unsafe conditions and substandard care at Walter Reed Army Medical
Centre, began with the story of Army Specialist Jeremy Duncan, who was
airlifted out of Iraq in February 2006 with a broken neck and a shredded
left ear, "nearly dead from blood loss". "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," the article read. "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."

The Post reported that patients inside Walter Reed, which lies just five
miles from the White House, found it difficult to receive the care they were
promised and felt they deserved.

When the story broke, politicians from both parties expressed outrage and
promised solutions. Walter Reed's commander, Major General George Weightman,
was fired almost immediately. Following him out the door was the Secretary
of the Army, Frances Harvey.

On Mar. 6, President George W. Bush announced the formation of a bipartisan
independent commission lead by former Republican Senator Bob Dole and Donna
Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services under the Bill Clinton
administration.

"It's unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to you, it's unacceptable to our
country, and it's not going to continue," Bush told the American Legion in a
speech announcing the commission's formation. "My decisions have put our
kids in harm's way. And I'm concerned about the fact that when they come
back they don't get the full treatment they deserve."

Three weeks later, Bush paid a visit to Walter Reed, and apologised again:
"I was disturbed by their accounts of what went wrong," Bush told Walter
Reed's staff after a tour of the facility. "It is not right to have someone
volunteer to wear our uniform and not get the best possible care. I
apologise for what they went through, and we're going to fix the problem."

But the allegations raised in the Washington Post were not actually new. In
February 2005, the exact same conditions had been raised in a damning series
in the on-line magazine Salon. Wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, reporter
Mark Benjamin wrote, are "overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers
instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatised combat
vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a
dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them."

Top Bush administration officials knew about Walter Reed's problems, but
they had other priorities. Indeed, before the Washington Post put the
facility's substandard conditions on its front page, President Bush's
appointees at the Pentagon had strenuously lobbied Congress against funding
military pensions, health insurance and benefits for widows of retirees.
Their argument: that money spent caring for wounded soldiers and their
families could be better spent on state-of-the-art military hardware or
enticing new recruits to join the force.

In January 2005, Bush's Undersecretary of Defence for Personnel and
Readiness David Chu, the official in charge of such things, went so far as
to tell the Wall Street Journal veterans' medical care and disability
benefits "are hurtful" and "are taking away from the nation's ability to
defend itself".

Before the scandal at Walter Reed broke in the Washington Post, the Bush
administration ran programmes for injured soldiers in much the same way it
did the rest of the war - primarily for the benefit of an elite group of
private contractors.

In 2005, with tens of thousands of casualties already reported, a Pentagon
commission recommended closing Walter Reed by 2011. When the commission
report became public, the Bush administration moved to privatise the
facility for as long as it would remain open, turning management of the
hospital over to IAP World Services, a politically well-connected firm with
almost no experience in military medicine.

In January 2006, the military awarded a five-year 120-million-dollar
contract to Florida-based IAP, which had already faced scrutiny from
Congress for unseemly profiteering after Hurricane Katrina. After the levees
broke, FEMA ordered the company to deliver 211 million pounds of ice
intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm.
Instead, IAP had the ice trucked around the country in circles at taxpayers'
expense, with much of it ending up in storage 2,500 kilometres away in
Maine.

The company's leadership had an even more extensive record of corruption.
Before going to work at IAP, company CEO Al Neffgen was a top executive at
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, where he was responsible for
"all work performed by KBR for the U.S. government". That included being
hauled before Congressional committees to testify about why the company
(which had earlier been run by Vice President Dick Cheney) had overcharged
U.S. taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars while providing support
for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Neffgren wasn't the only well-connected person at IAP. The company's
president, the aptly named David Swindle, is also a former executive at
Halliburton. One of its directors is Dan Quayle, Bush senior's vice
president from 1989-1993.

Employees started to leave Walter Reed before the deal was even finalised,
figuring they would lose their jobs anyway. When news of the contract first
surfaced in 2005, 300 federal employees provided facilities management
services at Walter Reed. That figure had dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3,
2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. When IAP did take
over, the company replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private
workers.

Inside Walter Reed, alarm bells were sounding. On Sep. 21, 2006, Garrison
Commander Peter Garibaldi wrote a letter to the base's commanding general
saying privatisation had put "patient care services at risk of mission
failure".

"We face the critical issues of retaining skilled personnel for the hospital
and diverse professionals for the Garrison, while confronted with increased
difficulty in hiring," he wrote.

No one took notice then, and little has been done since to improve care or
lessen bureaucracy at Walter Reed or at the Pentagon and the VA's network of
hospitals and clinics nationwide. Military hospitals are still
short-staffed. Injured soldiers are still left alone for hours, or even
days.

In September 2007, a Congressionally mandated report by the non-partisan
Government Accountability Office found the Pentagon and VA care for service
members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain
injury was "inadequate" with "significant shortfalls" of doctors, nurses and
other caregivers necessary to treat wounded soldiers.

According to the GAO, "46 percent of the Army's returning service members
who were eligible to be assigned to a (medical) unit had not been assigned
due in part to staffing shortages." Over half of the military's special
"Wounded Warrior Transition Units" had staffing shortfalls of more than 50
percent.

Key bases like Fort Lewis in Washington and Fort Carson in Colorado were
short massive amounts of doctors, nurses, and squad leaders. In short, the
Bush administration was simply not hiring enough doctors and nurses to care
for what had become a tidal wave of injured soldiers wounded in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

In December, Congress put its solution forward - folding a Wounded Warrior
Bill designed to help disabled veterans into a massive 700-billion-dollar
defence bill. But on Dec. 28, President Bush surprised many observers by
vetoing the measure. Bush objected to a provision that would allow victims
of Saddam Hussein's regime to seek compensation in court.

Congressional Democrats are now checking to see if they have the votes to
override Bush's veto. If they don't, they may send the bill back to
President Bush with the offending sections removed.

Either way, Veterans for Common Sense's Paul Sullivan says veterans are not
likely to see major progress until 2009.

"Some of the problems may be solved in the next year if Congress fights hard
but I do believe that the anti-veteran Bush administration does indeed need
to go away so that real reform can be brought to the Department of Veterans'
Affairs," Sullivan told IPS.

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/16/6408/

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