Damned if you do

Last year, the Army took an undeserved beating in the media for their poor outpatient facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. So, commanders put needles down on medical facilities and forced them to develop the Warrior Transition Units that focused medical and mental attention as well as counseling services to help soldiers get their lives back in order.

The Army fixed it’s medical treatment program. Think we can find someone to congratulate them? Not at the AP. Lolita Saldor writes “Too many soldiers in new program”

According to interviews and data provided to the AP, the number of patients admitted to the 36 Warrior Transition Units and nine other community-based units jumped from about 5,000 in June 2007, when they began, to a peak of nearly 12,500 in June 2008.

[…]

Just 12 percent of the soldiers in the units had battlefield injuries while thousands of others had minor problems that did not require the complex new network of case managers, nurses and doctors, according to Brig. Gen. Gary H. Cheek, the director of the Army’s warrior care office.

Um, Ms. Saldor, not just battlefield injuries require the kind of treatment you’ve described. Many more soldiers get injured in their day-to-day activities than in any other profession.

Of course, the AP can’t do a story about soldiers without quoting Jon Soltz, the combat motor pool hangar queen;

Jon Soltz, an Iraq war veteran and chairman of VoteVets.org, said the Pentagon is making a fair argument. He acknowledged that some soldiers with less serious injuries might not need the units’ services.

But he said commanders need to be able to move their soldiers who cannot deploy due to an injury to the units because that is the only way they can get a replacement before going to war. Otherwise, the brigade goes to battle without the forces needed.

“The larger concern here is that the problem that is driving this is the manpower problem,” said Soltz. “The Army is overextended. We don’t have enough guys.”

How that relates to the story, I have no idea, other than Soltz uses the opportunity to take another swipe at the Bush Administration based on Soltz’ four months of dispatching vehicles and filing 2404’s more than four years ago.

But the thing is this; the media drags out the Walter Reed story everytime they want to bash military leadership (just so you know, generals are “the troops”, too, guys) but Congress and the media stand athwart any real improvement.

The Army decided long before the dust-up last year that the current facilities in the crowded and crappy neighborhood on Georgia Avenue needed to be moved to a more spacious and clean new structure in Bethesda, MD. In order to expedite the move, they asked Congress to skip the usual bureaucratic redtape and allow them to begin building without an environmental impact study.

My congressman, the Far Left partisan Chris Von Hollen, blocked that…even though he was the loudest critic of the current facilities on Georgia Avenue.

Brigadier General Gary Cheek demonstrated exactly what the mission should be of the WTUs, despite what Soltz and the AP thinks;

“We don’t really care about the source of the wound, illness or injury. We really care about the severity of the wound, illness or injury,” said Cheek. “So if it’s a severe, very acute condition that needs rehabilitation and a lot of management and oversight, regardless of where it comes form, that soldier needs to be in this program.”

An injury is an injury and the soldier must be treated the best way the Army knows how. And since when is it a sin to do your job so well that too many people get treatment?

Here’s a screen shot of part of the article in case it disappears.

Category: Politics