Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility (Washington Post)
The black mold is nothing compared to the rest of the story. And we’re gonna send thousands more soldiers to Iraq? We can’t even provide proper care for the soldiers who are already injured.
Update: Here’s part two.
Update 2: Army Fixing Patients’ Housing. No word on what they’re doing about the bureacratic nightmare. Maybe it’s considered part of the recovery process to make brain-damaged patients track down their own caseworkers, or to put psychologically scarred patients in charge of suicidal ones, or to force patients who have lost legs to trek all over the compound every day.