Walter Reed Was The Army's Wake-Up Call In 2007

In 2010 I had a VIP tour of Walter Reed during the Memorial Day trip to the Vietnam Wall. The young men and women I met were incredible. They stood by each other as if related by blood and in a way, they were. Each one of them was seriously wounded in combat. Most were from Afghanistan. They were more worried about others than themselves.

Walking around waiting for a cab to take me to the hotel my thoughts went back to the report. The American people just assumed they were all being treated with the best that could be done for the wounded. We had no clue how bad it was until reporters told us how wrong we were. There was an uproar but the families and the wounded knew how bad it was then. Had they not been willing to do something about it, I wonder what it would have been like for the men and women I just met.

Courtesy of Oscar Olguin
At Walter Reed, Oscar Olguin and his family were visited by President Bush and first lady Laura Bush. But Olguin says that when he left the hospital, he had to fend for himself.

Walter Reed Was The Army's Wake-Up Call In 2007
by TOM BOWMAN

August 31, 2011
For more than a century, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was known as the hospital that catered to presidents and generals. Eisenhower was treated and died there. So too did Generals "Black Jack" Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall.

But in recent years, Walter Reed was shorthand for scandal.

A 2007 series that dominated the front page of The Washington Post told of decrepit housing and wounded soldiers left to fend for themselves.

But the problems were identified years before. Salon.com wrote about it in 2005. Members of Congress later said they had complained to senior Army officials a year or two earlier. Nothing happened.

Soldiers Fending For Themselves

Among those who had problems at Walter Reed was Oscar Olguin, an Army private who lost a leg in Iraq in 2004, when a suicide bomber struck his Humvee outside the city of Ramadi.

Olguin was discharged from the hospital at night in December 2005, in his wheelchair. He was simply told to find his new quarters.

"I got out. I was in my wheelchair. I was by myself," Olguin says. "I got released in the middle of the night. I'm trying to find my way. So I just started rolling around in my wheelchair. And ended up taking the streets, and just following the signs to get to Malogne House."

He never checked in with anybody, even as he attended his physical therapy appointments. It wasn't until three months later that Olguin was contacted by an Army master sergeant. "You're in my platoon," the sergeant told him. "And you have to check in with me every morning."

That wasn't Olguin's only problem. He also had a roommate.

"I had a roommate who was suffering from severe PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], who wasn't supposed to have any sharp objects," Olguin remembers. "I didn't know."

Olguin went on a ski trip with other wounded soldiers, and when he returned, his roommate was gone. Military police had taken him away.

"He tried to slash his own wrists with the knives that I had in my room," says Olguin. "That was probably the worst part. He could have killed himself, and I could've played a part in that, and not even known."
read more here