Exploiting Wounded Soldiers at Walter Reed

A two-part series in the Washington Post, written by Dana Priest and Anne Hull, claimed that some Iraq War veterans are getting substandard care at Walter Reed Medical Center. The articles described overcrowded facilities infested with rodents, cockroaches and mold, lost paperwork and patients who are discharged too early. "There are cockroaches," said one soldier suffering from a psychological disorder. "The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "

Of course, Dana Priest really should be in jail for her traitorous Pulitzer Prize-winning story about top secret prisons in eastern Europe. As Jonah Goldberg points out she has a left-wing bias and he won't believe the story unless Geraldo Rivera reports on it. I think her agenda is clear because she always writes negative stories about the Bush Administration and never writes anything bad about the Clinton Administration. If this story is true, Clinton was probably responsible for setting in motion the deterioration of conditions there, which couldn't have happened overnight.

Although the articles do make Walter Reed sound bad, they give a distorted, one-sided picture. They don't tell us about the thousands of tough, courageous veterans who survived their care there. The story makes some veterans look like whiners and complainers, when most veterans are happy to make sacrifices for their country. Veterans know that their service to their country doesn't end when they come home, and they are perfectly willing to save the government a little money, just as they were proud to serve without body armor or armored vehicles that would have been much too expensive to provide. Most veterans don't want to be coddled and they don't think they need the kind of care that only rich people can afford just for doing their duty. To imply otherwise is the journalistic equivalent of spitting on our brave soldiers.

Even if a small minority of soldiers are suffering, they would much prefer to suffer in silence rather than hurt the war effort, which is what many conservatives believe is the real agenda behind this story. Michelle Malkin pointed out that the article has a "condescending tone." Fuzzybear Lioness at Fuzzilicious Thinking wrote, "This was a pathetic piece of propaganda about how all the wounded are to be pitied and how they'll never be able to function in society, and how nobody really cares. The anti-war whisper throughout is almost a shout." Andi, who works as a volunteer at Walter Reed, writes of the reporters, "I am suspicious of their motives, and with good reason. The administrators in charge of Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospitals certainly appear inept as a result of this story, but the subtle nuggets of red meat handed to opponents of Operation Iraqi Freedom make an important story murky to those who are rightly skeptical of the mainstream media." Military blogger Black Five thinks Priest "toured military hospitals until she found the crappiest ones and also the most jerked-around wounded troops." He says every soldier knows that they should "embrace the suck," that is, "their job is to understand that the suck is supreme and their job is to suck it up and drive on."

Some conservatives have also pointed out that if this story is not a lie designed to erode the morale of our soldiers who haven't been wounded yet, then it is actually an argument for why universal health care would be bad for the country. "As a vet I am familiar with both the military and VA hospital experiences," said a commenter at Black Five. "Any critique of either must never lose sight of the fact that each is a centralized bureaucratic leviathan run by the Federal government. Whenever a leftie points out the problems in such a system, remind them that is the nature of the beast, and it's the same beast they ask for when they demand universal health care." Veterans health care is run by the government and anything run by the government is inefficient. So perhaps it would be better if our veterans had to buy private insurance instead of getting their health care free. Those soldiers, who, like some Americans, cannot afford health insurance, can receive care at hospital emergency rooms and free clinics. Though they may have to spend some time sitting around in waiting rooms, soldiers are accustomed to sitting around and doing nothing so it won't be too much of a burden for them. But the vast majority of soldiers would receive better care than they do now. And insurance companies and HMOs would encourage them to leave the hospital much sooner so that they could return to active duty in Iraq where they are needed, or if they are unable to go back, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (metaphorically, of course, in case of amputees) and try to cope with civilian life.

Predictably, Democrats are rushing to exploit the soldiers at Walter Reed for partisan gain by trying to correct the problems there before we are even sure they exist. Senators Barack Obama and Claire McCaskill are sponsoring legislation to improve the conditions at Walter Reed, and John Kerry has also signed on. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has called for an investigation. But it is doubtful that things are as bad at Walter Reed as this article claims no matter how much grandstanding the Democrats do. Republicans are taking a more measured wait-and-see approach. After all, President Bush has visited Walter Reed a number of times in the past five years and he didn't notice anything at all wrong with conditions there.

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Jon Swift, Walter Reed, Washington Post, Dana Priest, Jonah Goldberg, Health Care, Iraq, Bush, Michelle Malkin, Barack Obama, Journalism, Politics