Warrior Transition Battalion “steals your soul and puts you in a deeper depression"

Joint Base Lewis-McChord's warrior transition unit lacks training
Some of the soldiers managing care for ill and wounded troops at Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Warrior Transition Battalion lacked proper training before they began their assignments, according to a recently released Defense Department audit.
News Tribune
ADAM ASHTON
STAFF WRITER
Published: July 4, 2013

Some of the soldiers managing care for ill and wounded troops at Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Warrior Transition Battalion lacked proper training before they began their assignments, according to a recently released Defense Department audit.

That inconsistent training coupled with lengthy delays in the Army’s medical retirement process exasperated soldiers at a vulnerable point in military careers, soldiers told the Defense Department Inspector General when a team visited the Lewis-McChord site in summer 2011.

The Warrior Transition Battalion “steals your soul and puts you in a deeper depression,” one National Guard soldier told the auditors. “They tell me to plan for the future, but they cannot tell me when I can leave.”

Comments in the Inspector General report echo some of the criticism that has been leveled at the Army’s 38 so-called warrior transition units since they were created in 2007. A 2010 New York Times story famously labeled them “warehouses of despair” that kept soldiers in limbo between the civilian and military worlds.
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