The Army's outcast outpatients

WALTER REED Army Medical Center is a justifiably famous hospital that treats one-fourth of all troops seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Walter Reed has a darker side that was pushed into the limelight last weekend by articles in The Washington Post. On its 113 acres are several buildings --at least one of them roach- and rodent-infested -- that house 700 outpatients for 18 months or longer as they wait to find out whether they will be returned to duty or discharged. Many suffer from severe mental and physical disabilities and get little help from the military as they try to deal with its bureaucracy. Drug overdoses and suicide attempts are frequent.

The Army has responded immediately to the articles with overdue repairs on one 54-room building that suffers from mold, leaky plumbing, and a broken elevator. It promised to station social workers at another of the buildings for outpatients, a 200-room hotel that has a popular bar but no counselors or psychologists assigned there to work with the service members and their families as they cope with lost paperwork, postponed medical appointments, and uncertainty about their futures. The average outpatient must file 22 different documents with eight different military commands. The Army said it would also consider moving some of the outpatients to other military medical centers.

But if nothing is done to speed up the process of making decisions about the outpatients' futures, relocating them would simply make them less visible to reporters.

One cause for the limbo these troops are enduring is the difficulty of fighting a long, bloody war with a volunteer force. At a time when the Army in particular is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals and has been forced to accept far more enlistees with criminal records and poor education, it is loath to discharge any soldiers who could possibly be made fit once again for combat. The medical center's commanding officer, Major General George W. Weightman, told the Post that formerly many of the injured soldiers would have been discharged as quickly as possible. But "this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution."

Once it is decided that a wounded service member will be discharged, the next question is the level of disability, if any. One brain-injured corporal was finally told his cognitive shortcomings were a pre existing condition, raising the prospect he would get little if any disability pay. At that point, his wife called a House of Representatives staff member and in short order her husband was granted a 50 percent disability. But it should not take that kind of intervention for service members to get fair treatment. That should include making decisions about discharging soldiers based on their needs, not the Army's.