A soldier commits suicide and his body hangs for four days decomposing while no one checks on him. This didn't happen in some remote outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in one of the outpatient facilities at Walter Reed Hospital.
Army Master Sgt. James Curtis Coons was at Walter Reed for treatment after an attempted suicide in Kuwait. He should have been in a lockdown unit where he could be watched 24/7 but, instead, he was treated as an outpatient. When he failed to show up for an appointment, no one even looked in on him to see if he was OK. What the hell is going on? This happened four years ago!
What did George W. Bush really know about the treatment of soldiers at Walter Reid hospital? Is Bush's supposed ignorance really just another "no one could have predicted the breach of the levees" moment? What did Donald Rumsfeld know about how Walter Reed has failed veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? When did Robert Gates really find out? And if Bush, Rumsfeld, and Gates really didn't know, why weren't they told? We need to know the answers to these questions.
More below.
http://www.thenewsblog.net/
http://archive.salon.com/...
Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and Julie Tate of the Washington Post deserve a great deal of credit for their investigative reporting and for giving the Walter Reed story a much higher profile, but Mark Benjamin of Salon.com has been covering it for years now.
This morning (tips to Steve Gillard), I started reading Benjamin's stories for the first time, and what I have read makes my blood boil. I highly recommend reading all of Benjamin's coverage.
Right now, I just want to highlight one article from February 2005 about the treatment of soldiers like Coons who are sent to Walter Reed for treatment of PTSD. I guess this story really hit home for me, because I'm in psychology and have experienced PTSD myself.
After Coons' suicide according to Benjamin,
the hospital said it has recently "enacted more stringent policies and procedures to strengthen outpatient soldier accountability"; for example, a Walter Reed staff member is now sent to check on patients who don't show up for appointments, the hospital said.
But now, thanks to the Washington Post, we've learned that four years after Coons' tragic death, soldiers in some of the outpatient facilities at Walter Reed are living in squalor and don't have the support they need to get to appointments and fill out paperwork.
Here's another story from Benjamin's article:
Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment. Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq.
A copy of Soto-Ramirez's medical records, reviewed by Salon, show that a doctor who treated him in Puerto Rico upon his return from Iraq believed his mental problems were probably caused by the war and that his future was in the Army's hands. "Clearly, the psychiatric symptoms are combat related," a clinical psychologist at Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital wrote on Nov. 24, 2003. The entry says, "Outcome will depend on adequacy and appropriateness of treatment." Doctors in Puerto Rico sent Soto-Ramirez to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., to get the best care the Army had to offer. There, he was put in Ward 54, Walter Reed's "lockdown," or inpatient psychiatric ward, where the most troubled patients are supposed to have constant supervision.
But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'
So in early 2005, even when a patient was in the lockdown unit at Walter Reed, it still didn't mean anyone was paying attention, although Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez's body was probably found a little faster than Coons' was. Has this situation changed? According to Benjamin, Walter Reed has been evasive about how many suicides and suicide attempts have taken place on their watch.
According to Benjamin, veterans suffering from the PTSD--who have nightmares, flashbacks, rage attacks, and severe anxiety and paranoia--aren't necessarily getting the best treatment. Instead of getting one-on-one therapy with a trained professional, they get group therapy, often led by interns. Patients report that they are discouraged from talking about the horrors of war and are instead asked to talk about their their family relationships. Why? Because the Government might have to pay disability if the patient's symptoms were caused by their war experiences. Here's one example:
"When you get [to Walter Reed], they analyze you, break you down, and try to find anything wrong with you before you got in" the Army, said Spc. Josh Sanders, in a telephone conversation from his home in Lovington, Ill. "They started asking me questions about my mom and my dad getting divorced. That was the last thing on my mind when I'm thinking about people getting fragged and burned bodies being pulled out of vehicles," said Sanders. "They asked me if I missed my wife. Well, shit yeah, I missed my wife. That is not the fucking problem here. Did you ever put your foot through a 5-year-old's skull?"
So what did Bush and the military leadership know and when did they know it?
According to Salon's War Room:
http://www.salon.com/...
...in early 2005, Salon brought to the attention of Walter Reed officials disturbing information based on interviews, medical records and other Army documents which showed that soldiers receiving outpatient treatment for mental wounds were suffering from a shocking pattern of neglect....In early 2006, Salon alerted Army and Walter Reed officials to a very similar set of concerns: Some soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were not being screened, identified or treated. They were falling through the cracks.
In both 2005 and 2006, authorities at Walter Reed either denied there were problems or simply refused to comment.
Maybe Congressional Democrats are already investigating this unacceptable situation. If not, investigations need to start immediately and they must extend to veterans treatment facilities around the country.
Here is what one patient "who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor" told Benjamin:
"I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."
Do we really want thousands of these stories repeated in veterans' treatment facilities in our country? We, as a society, are going to have to deal with the results of this, whether we like it or not. We need to make sure that Bush pays a price too. Meanwhile, go read Salon's coverage if you can find the time.