(HOST) How we care for our veterans, especially those returning wounded from Iraq, has been in the headlines again. And commentator Bill Seamans hopes that this time – things will change.
(SEAMANS) After a week of heated debate over President Bush’s proposed surge of more troops for Iraq Carl Levin, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said we need another surge – a “surge of concern” at home for our wounded Iraq veterans. Levin was speaking, of course, about the Washington Post story that revealed the shocking conditions in which the so-called outpatients at Walter Reed Army hospital were living. Senator Levin said the Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing next Tuesday to investigate how moldy and cockroach-ridden quarters could exist in a hospital that gives our wounded perhaps the best military medicine in the world.
There are, in fact, two Walter Reeds – the first is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles with medical advances saving more of our soldiers than ever. The other Walter Reed is where the patients go after they leave their hospital beds – where they live while receiving further treatment and await decisions on where they go next. There they say they encounter a numbing bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas… .
The situation at Walter Reed is an unforgivable failure of leadership by the top officer responsible. A good leader knows that the delegation of authority has limits – that the officer in charge should make personal inspections of the lower echelons of his or her responsibility. This apparently did not happen at Walter Reed and from this observer’s perspective the general involved should be invited to resign.
Beyond incompetent leadership those charged with oversight also are responsible – and now we are talking about our Congresspersons. Senator Levin blamed the Republican congress in control until January for the lack of oversight. But we ask why the then-minority Democratic members also did not raise an alarm since they, too, visited the hospital. The moral is that there appears to be enough blame to pass around on a bipartisan basis.
Senator Levin’s inquiry surely will focus national attention on other profound Veterans Administration problems – problems that veterans have been complaining about for years with little response, if any, from the Bush administration.
Veterans organizations say they often hear platitudes and promises from the politicians at ceremonies and observances – but, the words ring hollow, they say, when veterans are forced to wait months for doctors’ appointments at overcrowded VA hospitals – a neglect that is a national disgrace.
Senator Levin’s promised hearing is long past due and we hope that it results in giving our wounded veterans the kind of support, that is our heartfelt moral debt for their suffering.
Bill Seamans is a former correspondent and bureau chief for ABC News in the Middle East.