“The next morning he was found dead in his room.”
By Mona
We are saving most of our troops who reach our medical units in Iraq, and then they often end up at Walter Reed. And how are we supporting them there? Read about the mold, rotted ceilings, mouse droppings, roach bombs, neglect, institutional insanity, and sheer despair for our wounded and their families in today’s WaPo. Article titled Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility.
Some of the low points, but it’s all bad:
Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, 43, came [to Walter Reed] on one of those buses in November 2004 … His eye and skull were shattered by an AK-47 round. His odyssey …has lasted more than two years, but it began when someone handed him a map of the grounds and told him to find his room across post.
A reconnaissance and land-navigation expert, Shannon was so disoriented that he couldn’t even find north. Holding the map, he stumbled around outside the hospital, sliding against walls and trying to keep himself upright…
Shannon, who wears an eye patch and a visible skull implant, said he had to prove he had served in Iraq when he tried to get a free uniform to replace the bloody one left behind on a medic’s stretcher…..One amputee, a senior enlisted man who asked not to be identified because he is back on active duty, said he received orders to report to a base in Germany as he sat drooling in his wheelchair in a haze of medication. “I went to Medhold many times in my wheelchair to fix it, but no one there could help me,” he said…..The lack of accountability weighed on Shannon. He hated the isolation of the younger troops. The Army’s failure to account for them each day wore on him. When a 19-year-old soldier down the hall died, Shannon knew he had to take action.
The soldier, Cpl. Jeremy Harper, returned from Iraq with PTSD after seeing three buddies die. He kept his room dark, refused his combat medals and always seemed heavily medicated, said people who knew him. According to his mother, Harper was drunkenly wandering the lobby of the Mologne House on New Year’s Eve 2004, looking for a ride home to West Virginia. The next morning he was found dead in his room. An autopsy showed alcohol poisoning, she said.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
Republicans care about the troops in exactly the same theoretical way as pro-lifers care about children.
Comment by Barry —
February 18, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
Can’t we part out the 101st Keyboarders for organs and such? Take their houses to house vets?
Comment by Grant Gould —
February 18, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
See, this is why people who keep talking about the 3rd Amendment are so out of touch with the post-9/11 world. We need to quarter some of these troops in these peoples’ houses.
Comment by monkey.rdave —
February 18, 2007 @ 7:35 pm
Some apocryphal hippie spits on a soldier and it’s on all the networks 24/7. A real life soldier goes to a VA hospital and has cockroaches crawling around him and he should just “suck it up”. It would be nice if the War Party considered soldiers to be real people rather than just campaign props.
Comment by Mona —
February 18, 2007 @ 8:31 pm
Grant Gould: the 3rd doesn’t prohibit commandeering homes for soldiers’ families. Of course, those who support the troops by supporting the mission and getting more of them killed and maimed in a civil war that will perchance spread throughout the Middle East after we do our hot pursuit thing into Iran, those troop supporters will no doubt be selling off their properties for the wounded vets, their spouses, and children.
In the meantime, the rest of us will have to accept tax hikes or cuts elsewhere, so that we can do the moral thing by these vets. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
February 18, 2007 @ 10:39 pm
Tax hikes or cuts? The military is already flowing with money, it’s just going to defense contractors. More money would just add to their profit margin, until the people directing the money have changed.
This, like Katrina, is what happens when you get con men and hacks running the government. The organizational failure goes all the way down. And there is nothing inevitable about it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 18, 2007 @ 11:28 pm
Grant and Mona, you are out-Yooing Yoo with the constitutional . . . YOOING! I am impressed.
Rich, agreed. We can either take some of the money that would have gone to the two extra divisions all the sensible commenters and candidates want to add and put it toward veteran health care or cut back some weapons programs.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 19, 2007 @ 9:34 am
I believe that harvesting tissue from Glenn Reynolds to provide skin grafts for wounded soldiers is an inherent power of the executive.
But I think any honorable soldier would refuse a tissue graft from Glenn Reynolds, once he learned the disgusting source.
Comment by Mona —
February 19, 2007 @ 10:13 am
Oh my stars and garters, Thoreau, you are out-Yooing me.