San Antonio, a very military town, is outraged by the news coming out of Walter Reed. If heads don't roll in the Pentagon, I think Washington can look for a siege by Santa Ana leading a brigade of furious family members of the vets.
Here is some of what is fueling the anger, as heard on San Antonio's best talk show a couple of hours ago.
1. The latest episode of that Bush administration favorite, the Blame Game, as described in a article in the Army Times.
Weightman arrived at Walter Reed as commander only last August. By then, a Government Accountability Office report had already laid out the problems with the Army’s medical evaluation system that occurred between 2001 and 2005, and an inspector general investigation was underway that ultimately found 87 problems with the medical evaluation system. Those well-documented problems occurred during the tenure of Maj. Gen. Kenneth Farmer, now retired, who was at Walter Reed from 2004 to 2006, and Kiley, now the Army surgeon general, who served as Walter Reed chief from 2002 to 2004 — and who fired Weightman.
“The chain of command knew about this,” Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Military Times. “There is no way they didn’t know. In 2004, we knew soldiers were carrying the paperwork through the snow. Firing Weightman is not enough. Congress needs to find out who knew and clean house.”
2. And a shocker in the same Army Times article: the Army is downgrading its assessments of severe injuries in order to get away with spending less money on the severely wounded.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Mike Parker also finds it frustrating. For at least two years, he has gathered thousands of pages of documents — which he shared with Military Times — and banged on doors trying to get the problems he saw fixed. He spends much of his free time trying to help soldiers through the process. But he also spent time alerting lawmakers and speaking before the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission — which has heard testimony from doctors in the disability rating system who say much needs to be done to help soldiers. In March 2006, Parker filed a complaint with the inspector general at Walter Reed asking for an investigation of whether the medical evaluation boards were following the law, and another complaint with the Army’s Human Resources Command. He said the Army is supposed to rate injuries according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Schedule for Rating Disabilities, but charged that Army officials wrote their own regulation in the mid-1990s that allows them to rate disabilities differently — and at lower percentages. No other service has such a regulation.
3. The column written last week by Joe Galloway, of McClatchy Newspapers' Washington Bureau, about the emerging scandal.
Within 24 hours, construction crews were working overtime, slapping paint over the moldy drywall, patching the sagging ceilings and putting out traps and poison for the critters that infest the place.
Within 48 hours, the Department of Defense announced that it was appointing an independent commission to investigate. Doubtless the commission will provide a detailed report finding that no one was guilty - certainly none of the politicians of the ruling party whose hands were on the levers of power for five long years of war.
They will find that it all came about because the Army medical establishment was overwhelmed by the caseload flowing out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, brave soldiers who were wheelchair-bound with missing legs or paralysis, have been left to make their own way a quarter-mile to appointments with the shrinks and a half-mile to pick up the drugs that dim their minds and eyes and pain, and make the rats and roaches recede into a fuzzy distance.
4. The email Galloway got and with a suggestion many think is a good one, a serious one.
One reader e-mailed me this week to suggest that if we really want to get to the bottom of this scandal, we should appoint an investigative commission made up of 10 mothers of wounded soldiers instead of the usual suspects who sit on blue-ribbon commissions and find no one responsible for problems. The mothers, the reader wrote, would sort out who was to blame in short order and find the problems that need fixing even faster. I second her motion.
