Many who blog from the right spend plenty of deserved time taking down the Surrender Caucus of the left, and battling the inadequacies of the Main Stream Media. However we should also leave time to point out the shortcomings of those we usually support.

In this instance I am unfortunately talking about the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense. In a previous post, I pointed out the need for Congressmen to 'Remain Faithful' to the troops. Well....perhaps the Army might want to remember that as well.

Dana Priest and the Washington Post have a riveting and disturbing story about the perils of being an 'outpatient' at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Now I have taken Priest to task in the past for her reporting that exposed intelligence capabilities, and her ties to the power base on the left. However this time I will give her kudos.

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.

.... While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

Read the whole thing. Watch the Video. Watch the Photo slide show.

It is this type of bureaucratic, REMF operations that make you want to smack the crap out of the Army.

I mean the first thing I would do is set up a handicap-capable shuttle bus that did nothing but circle the WRAMC campus, making stops at all the important points. Duh! It is depressing to see that the very wounded themselves are being forced to care for each other, and come up with solutions to the problems that the Army won't.

Perhaps someone should take General Casey or Bob Gates there for an icognito, 'day-in-the-life' immersion tour. Perhaps then a fire might get lit.

HT: CASTLE ARGGHHH!

UPDATE: Armchair Generalist has another "great" example of bureaucratic REMF thinking impeding the treatment of our war wounded.