Walter Reed failing our troops

Last week The Washington Post broke a story on the conditions at The Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army's top medical facility. The Post's reporters conducted interviews for more than four months. All of these interviews were done without the knowledge of the hospital or the military, and as a result many of the patients interviewed were scared to even give their names to reporters, fearing a backlash from their superiors.

The explanations of conditions at Building 18 at Walter Reed are by far the hardest to read. The Post describes bathrooms where the floors are rotted through and patients can see the bathtubs on the floor above them from their own.

Patients are given mousetraps and have to deal with cockroaches, among other infestations. There is mold in some of the rooms, but patients are afraid to complain because they don't want to be moved into another room cramped with other suffering patients. Many of the patients rely on carryout food and other greasy alternatives because the cafeteria is too far away for many of them to make the trek.

Outpatients are forced to watch over other patients in what appears to be a hectic and unorganized process. Whiteboards show patients missing, and nurses and other personnel can only guess as to where they are.

In what I think is the most outrageous offense, patients with psychological disorders as a result of combat are forced to watch over other patients on suicide watch. The Post relates the story of one outpatient whose post-traumatic stress disorder was triggered by seeing wounded soldiers when he was given 200 rooms to supervise. A mother relates the story of her son who was under 21 and died in the hospital from alcohol poisoning. Other patients face a bureaucratic nightmare when they have to fill out as many as 22 various forms just to enter and exit the hospital.

Patients told the reporters that even though Iraq was a nightmare, being at Walter Reed is only making their recovery process worse. Many of the wounds of war are psychological, and an environment loaded with stress and horrible conditions will certainly only make things worse for these troops.

So are these conditions the result of a president who is blind to them, or just one who doesn't care? I was hoping he was just ignorant and didn't know what was going on, but Press Secretary Tony Snow stated otherwise. Snow told a reporter that President Bush knew about these conditions before The Post's report.

"I am not certain when this [HTML_REMOVED] when we first became aware of it. Now, the president certainly has been aware of the conditions in the wards where he has visited, and visited regularly. And we also have people from Walter Reed regularly over to the White House as the guests, sometimes in fairly large numbers," he said.

For an administration that regularly insults Democrats' support of the troops and calls their criticism of the administration a vote for Al Qaeda, you would think they would take the best possible care of wounded troops. If someone who truly supports the troops heard of these horrible conditions, the expected reaction would be to immediately fix these horrible problems that they have to face at Walter Reed.

Bush, on the other hand, is all about image. As long as the public doesn't know about it, he doesn't have to care. Now that The Post has broken the story, they might actually change a few things just for appearances sake.

Speaking of appearance, a military amputee was uninvited to an award ceremony at which Bush was scheduled to appear. The amputee said that he was going to wear shorts because it was summer, and he was uninvited because as an amputee he would be seated in the first row. He would only be allowed to the ceremony if he wore pants because that would look better for the media. Apparently Bush has a hard time letting the American people see the cold hard truth. People are being injured, disfigured and killed in Iraq, and he just doesn't want people to see it. He hasn't cared enough about the troops to bring them home, and when they get back here our services are failing them on their own soil as well.

Perhaps Gov. Christine Gregoire should be taking the advice of some liberals in the media and start requesting that Washington troops be sent back to Washington for their care. Hospitals in Seattle are some of the best in the nation, and since Bush isn't looking out for our troops, someone has to.

Reach columnist Hunter Kincaid at hunterkincaid@thedaily.washington.edu.