The Meaning of Walter Reed

By MICHAEL WEISSKOPF

We used to get chocolate milk delivered to our beds. The amputees of Walter Reed Army Medical Center grew accustomed to first-class service. "The Ritz-Carlton is where you want to go, not Motel 6," the head nurse of Ward 57 told her staff after the Iraq war began in 2003. "That's how I want all my patients treated."

It was the kind of courtesy that was apparently reserved for such overnight guests. A recent Washington Post expose revealed that some wounded soldiers were placed in outpatient facilities plagued by mice, mildew and mismanagement. It's a shocking account, and not only for ordinary Americans who know Walter Reed by its spit-shine, high-tech image. An embedded TIME reporter who lost a hand in a grenade attack, I was treated at the hospital as a patient from Dec. 16, 2003, to Jan. 8, 2004. From my home in Washington, I returned regularly as an outpatient over the next 18 months for therapy and prosthesis training.

My treatment was exemplary. But I never saw Building 18, the notorious barrack described in the Post account, nor heard more than routine grumblings about red tape from outpatients living on the hospital grounds. Compared with the VA systems that many wounded vets later encounter, Walter Reed seemed cozy and efficient.

Yet I understand why the Post report has touched such a raw nerve. No other scandal arising from the Iraq war has prompted such sudden firings of top brass and abject Pentagon apologies. Defense Secretary Robert Gates saw a public hungry for accountability, not perspective. It was too late to erase the image of the peeling, moldy walls in Building 18, even if it housed just one recovering soldier for every 1,000 living in comfort. The damage was done.

We expect the best for our wounded. They occupy a special place in the national consciousness. No matter what most Americans think of President Bush's policies, we agree to put the interests of injured soldiers first. It wasn't that way for Vietnam vets, who were scorned and warehoused in decrepit VA hospitals--a mistake Americans don't want repeated. Some of us may feel guilty now for cheering on the invasion only to later lose faith in the war, leaving the troops to deal with the calamitous aftermath. Others of us no doubt feel indebted to a generation of warriors who have volunteered to serve, sparing the rest of us from duty.

And Americans believed Walter Reed helped make good on their IOU. My fellow amputees on Ward 57 knew that if you had to lose a limb, you were in the right place, a citadel of excellence where President Eisenhower and generals from Pershing to MacArthur went to die. Even during this war, the hospital seemed to symbolize the one thing going right for the Army--dramatically improved odds of surviving serious injury and of restoring function among the survivors. Today's soldiers may not be able to stop roadside bombs from blowing off their limbs, but they'll walk out of Walter Reed with bionic arms and legs.

Now we know that problems arose when they walked into the outpatient world. The buddies I made left for Mologne House, on Walter Reed's grounds, which is run like a fine hotel. But as the number of casualties grew in 2005, so did the number released from inpatient wards to other barracks on the 113-acre campus. Ironically, good medicine contributed to their swelling numbers. Instead of discharging wounded soldiers to less sophisticated VA facilities, doctors sought to keep them longer to provide training with artificial limbs and therapy for brain injuries and post-traumatic-stress disorder.

It strikes me as unfair to punish Walter Reed's leaders for extending top-notch services longer than military hospitals have in the past. Hospital commander General George Weightman, who was fired, had begun to address outpatient issues even before they became public. But he and his colleagues failed to grasp the extent to which Walter Reed's responsibilities had grown from frontline medicine to hospitality, a job they were no more prepared for than Pentagon planners were for the long-term occupation of Iraq. The battle of the wounded will continue long after the fighting, their plight resonating with a public outraged by the war and sympathetic to its principal U.S. victims.

Conditions for Walter Reed's outpatients are probably far better than the scandal suggests. But in a war with few supporters, it's in theaters like Building 18, rather than the Sunni Triangle, where the contest for public opinion is lost.