Sick

After yesterday's rant about the lack of appropriate coverage on the war, Dana Priest and Anne Hull prove that there are excellent reporters out there doing excellent work (hat tip to Atrios). Their article in today's Post on the sorry state of Walter Reid Army Medical Center is one such piece. For those unfamiliar with Walter Reid, it is the primary surgical and recovery center for injured troops. And as the article reveals, the facility is a cockroach-infested dump; a disgusting place for honorable men and women to recuperate.

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.

[Snip]

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.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

Oy - this is shameful. And somehow, voting against escalation equates to not supporting the troops. Well, what the hell do you call this?