When it comes to our troops and veterans, I am an equal opportunity zealot.
I railed against the Bush administration when the shameful facts of the “Walter Reed scandal” unfolded.
Today, under a new administration, we read about another scandal in the making—one that is affecting thousands of our troops at our Warrior Transition units.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on a nine-month investigation that found that “America’s sick and injured soldiers must struggle to mend inside 38 Warrior Transition units the Army has turned into dumping grounds for criminals, malingerers and dope addicts.”
The Trib explains:
Originally designed to treat the wounded from twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, after nearly a decade of battle these barracks snag soldiers in red tape. Despite an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, brain injuries and substance abuse linked to repeated combat deployments, soldiers sometimes spend years desperately seeking psychological care.
Overlooked, over-medicated and overseen by a stressed staff, the hardest hit often are in the Army National Guard and Reserves.
According to the Trib, the most chronic problems plague the Army, “America’s largest service and the one that’s doing the most fighting overseas,” as it seems unable to “…trim the ranks of patients filling the Warrior Transition units a never-ending flood of broken soldiers that too often buried the special medical units, demoralizing patients and military staffers, according to the files.”
According to various reports, commanders circumvent and “hurt the health of all Warrior Transition patients by dumping on the medical units soldiers they don’t want to take overseas everyone from cancer cases and GIs hurt in accidents to trouble makers, dope addicts, potential suicides and malingerers;” by placing soldiers in the medical units “as an expedient means by which to rid their units of their ‘undesirables’; ” by knowingly using the special units as “convenient pre-deployment ‘dumping grounds.’”
Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Noel Koch, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009 to correct this situation says:
I think the time has come for Congress to look harder into what has been going on with our wounded warriors. We’ve deserted them before…We did this during Vietnam. We don’t need to repeat that history.
By the way, Koch’s tenure “ended abruptly in April when he and his investigators at the Pentagon’s Office of Wounded Warrior Care and Transition Policy were in the midst of a nationwide investigation similar to the Trib probe.”
While this deplorable situation has been “evolving” for several years, it is the Obama Administration that now has the ball and that must correct the problems.
Read more here.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.