This Makes Me Angry

Really, really angry. The next time some yahoo claims that anyone opposing the failed Bush war doesn't support the troops, refer them to this article from WaPo and ask them about the administration's "support for the troops."

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.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

Is this the administration's "support": "OK, you've stopped bleeding. We're done with you."

Apparently it is. Here's Bush's help for veterans:

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now — even as wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The White House claims this doesn't represent a "policy shift." So they're playing with VA numbers to make the borrow-and-spend White House look good, I guess.

And here's a a follow-up to the original WaPo piece.

Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee. Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.

David tangled with Walter Reed's image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.

" 'Are you telling me that I can't go to the ceremony 'cause I'm an amputee?' " David recalled asking. "She said, 'No, I'm saying you need to wear pants.' "

David told the case worker, "I'm not ashamed of what I did, and y'all shouldn't be neither." When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Look, we all know that bureaucracies are the devil's work, but this is beyond incompetence. This is what we get when "support for the troops" means sending them off to fight Halliburton's war and then forgetting about them when the war chews them up and spits them out. Gods forbid the prreznit should actually have to see someone his war has damaged.

So help me, if some Bush-wacko accuses me of not supporting the troops because I think we need to get out of there, I'll just deck the SOB.

Update:

Some additional commentary by Kevin Hayden at American Street.

And myths will arise about how anti-war liberals mistreated the troops. In reality, it’ll be liberals working in underpaid non-profit agency jobs that will be dressing the psychic wounds of the injured long after the rest of the country’s forgotten them.

He also links to this post by Philip Carter at Intel Dump.

This is the tip of the iceberg. The Walter Reed hospital sees the most seriously wounded military personnel who come home. These personnel often require significant medical, mental-health, and rehabilitative care, and this is a mammoth undertaking. I am extremely disturbed to see these problems at the military's flagship hospital. We owe our wounded sons and daughters more.

But these wounded are not the only warriors who are suffering right now. We have had roughly 1.4 million troops rotate through the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have rotated through mobilizations since Sept. 11, 2001. Our military will likely remain engaged in these wars for the foreseeable future, and hundreds of thousands more will rotate through these two theaters. Yet despite these operational facts, the VA budget continues to atrophy. Veterans seeking disability ratings must wait between 6-12 months to receive an adjudication. Veterans without a service-connected disability rating who do not meet a stringent "means test" may be excluded from the system entirely. Although the VA has been rated as the nation's finest medical system, it increasingly cannot deliver that care to the population it exists to serve. Why?

Why, indeed?

Update II:

Given the huge amount of waste and embezzlement in Iraq on the part of the independent contractors and the no-bid contracts to well-connected firms, I guess we can see where the money that should be going to our vets is really headed. See this comment by Skippy at American Street. You can also see how the Investor's Business Daily is supporting the troops.