Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Stop Posturing, Start Caring

Wednesday February 21, 2007

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Dear Mr. Mullings

While Members of the House and the Senate spent the last week bobbing up and down in the political waters, moving neither forward nor backward, on a heading to nowhere, pretending to be doing the nation's business while debating (or not debating) a meaningless resolution about Iraq, two reporters from the Washington Post were doing what journalists are supposed to do: Finding real news and making a real difference.

In a two-part article, reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull describe the way our most vulnerable heroes - those who have been seriously wounded in combat - are treated in the aftermath of their acute care at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC.

Describing a dilapidated former half-star hotel now named "Building 18" where soldiers are sent for long-term rehab:

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.

How can this be? How can we throw these young men and women, who were armed to the teeth while in Iraq, into a broken down tenement at the exact moment when they are most defenseless in trying to deal with the vast military bureaucracy?

It is not just the physical layout which presents intractable problems. According to the reporting of Priest and Hull:

The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands -- most of them off-post -- to enter and exit the medical processing world, according to government investigators. Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another.
The Army's three personnel databases cannot read each other's files and can't interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases.

Anyone who has had to fill out forms at a doctors office knows how frustrating it can be to answer the same questions over and over. Now, think about doing it with an amputated arm and a head injury while on heavy doses of pain medication.

Where is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa)? That's where the money should come from to fix the walls and ceiling for all the Specialist Duncans who are under the care of the US Army and in physical and psychological pain.

It appears that Murtha is more interested in making headlines for himself, than in making headway for wounded soldiers.

How about one of the very first candidates to announce for President, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Ca) who was Chairman of the House Armed Service Committee when the GOP ruled the House and is still the senior Republican?

Hunter has as much chance of becoming President as I do. Next time he sends out a copy of his campaign schedule, it would be nice if it included a stop at Building 18 on Georgia Avenue in Washington, DC.

After the two-part series ran in the WashPost on Sunday and Monday, someone at the Pentagon got a boot placed squarely where it belongs which lead to the headline in Tuesday's paper: Army Fixing Patients' Housing.

This is not a Republican failure, nor a Democratic failure. Maybe it is not even a Congressional failure. It is a failure of all of us for not caring.

This is what always happens after the flags have stopped waving and the bands have stopped playing: Someone's mother or wife, someone's husband or dad, someone's brother or sister is left to pick up the broken pieces of what had been a healthy young man or woman who had marched off to war.

It is time for the Congress to stop posturing and for us to start caring. It is time to find out how many Building 18s there are in the Army medical system and fix them all.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to all three parts of the two-part series; a map showing how to get to Walter Reed from Capitol Hill; and a Catchy Caption of the Day from New Orleans.

ALSO - Read the newest edition of Ask Mr. Mullings!

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