Word: reede
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Hurricane Bob, continuing to blow through the Pentagon, took down its third major Army official Monday in the wake of the Walter Reed scandal. Army Surgeon General Kevin Kiley, who had run the Army's pre-eminent hospital from 2002 to 2004, has submitted his resignation, the Army announced. Following the firing of Army Secretary Francis Harvey and Walter Reed commander Major General George Weightman, Army officials are talking of new leadership to fix the care given to wounded outpatients at Walter Reed...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...