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.

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  thanks to Huffington Post

Not Acceptable

How dare Brit Hume of Faux News sit on the Sunday program yesterday and accuse Rep. Jack Murtha of not understanding the reality of things on the ground. Rep. Murtha visits Walter Reed on a weekly basis, and he regularly meets privately with the brass at the Pentagon and asks them to be honest — really honest — about how things really are, not just the current public PR Snow Job. Here's some reality, Brit: take some of your big time newsboy paycheck and donate it to help the families of soldiers and the soldiers themselves. Volunteer some of your time at a local VA hospital. Volunteer some time helping to do repairs at the home of a widow of one of our soldiers killed in combat — because she can't afford to call a plumber to come and fix her problem. But if you aren't doing any of these things, if you are not getting up off your pampered ass and actually DOING tangible things to help our troops and their families? Then your opinion is meaningless to me, Brit. I live in West Virginia, surrounded by the families and friends of folks who have served in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq. I see the cost of George Bush's failures every single day.

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This is in Spanish but the pictures need no elaboration.

Esas imágenes que los Estados Unidos no quieren ver

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

STATEMENT BY DAVID CLINE, PRESIDENT OF VETERANS FOR PEACE

Today we are involved in a continuing military conflict in Iraq. Veterans For Peace questions the wisdom and the necessity for this military adventure and believes our troops should be brought home now. We also insist that the men and women serving in uniform receive the medical care and assistance they need. In Iraq, many GIs have suffered severe wounds, in fact the numbers are so great that the current administration has tried to misrepresent and hide these casualties from public consciousness. Many soldiers will come back suffering from the emotional wounds of war trauma. We can expect many others to come back sick from the use of Depleted Uranium munitions and other deadly military toxins found on today’s battlefields. It is the grossest hypocrisy to wave yellow ribbons and say you “support the troops”, then cynically cut the very hospitals that the wounded and disabled will need. It is betrayal to those warriors who fought in this nation’s past wars. It is shameful and it is unacceptable.

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  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home a Trying Front

In the nearly two years Cpl. John Callahan of the Army was away from home, his wife, he said, had two extramarital affairs. She failed to pay his credit card bills. And their two children were sent to live with her parents as their home life deteriorated. Then, in November, his machine gun malfunctioned during a firefight, wounding him in the groin and ravaging his left leg. When his wife reached him by phone after an operation in Germany, Corporal Callahan could barely hear her. Her boyfriend was shouting too loudly in the background. “Haven’t you told him it’s over?” Corporal Callahan, 42, recalled the man saying. “That you aren’t wearing his wedding ring anymore?” For Corporal Callahan, who is recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and so many other soldiers and family members, the repercussions, chaos and loneliness of wartime deployments are one of the toughest, least discussed byproducts of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and loved ones have endured long, sometimes repeated separations that test the fragility of their relationships in unforeseen ways.

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