with the treatment VA clinic have, not the treatment you want or wish to have or need now. 11 days and waiting for an appointment. The VA administrator in Montana resigned, saying she wanted to be with her family more. The one before her screwed up and was just moved to Colorado.

Erik Shinseki, who resigned Friday as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, first came to prominence for stating too bluntly the cost of war. He now leaves office because the VA was unable to manage that cost.

.....Another reason to question how widespread the scheduling problem may be is that a 2013 survey conducted outside the agency found VA hospital customer satisfaction, at 82%, only one percentage point below the private-sector average. VA hospitals even received an 81% ranking for “accessibility.” If veterans all over the country were incensed about interminable wait times, one would not expect these scores to be so high.

But if the jury’s still out on whether long VA wait times for doctors occur nationwide, no such doubt exists about the long delays veterans are experiencing to receive disability benefits. Since 2000, VA disability payments have almost doubled, from $15 billion to more than $35 billion annually. Yet the backlog of pending disability claims stands at 344,000. Shinseki actually presided over a drastic reduction in that backlog—it was 611,000 claims a year ago. Still, 344,000 is a lot of disability claims.

.....This is the cost of war that Shinseki can’t manage, nor anyone else: Half the people who go to war today come back damaged in the VA’s official estimation. So high a human toll is a fact that the U.S. has yet to come to terms with.

Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, said soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass - what they called "hillbilly armor" - to bolt on to their trucks for protection against roadside bombs in Iraq.

"Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 troops assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary. Mr. Rumsfeld responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible.

A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Mr. Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing "to address shortages and antiquated equipment" National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq were struggling with.

Mr. Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced them. "Now settle down, settle down," he said. "Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning and I'm gathering my thoughts here."

But even he ripped on "Rummy" back then.