“Drowning in War” - Interview with Max Cleland

This is from an early March Newsweek article, but no less important today. I didn't see it posted, so here goes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17473011/site/newsweek/

“Drowning in War”
The military health-care system can’t keep pace with the flood of battlefield casualties. Max Cleland—Vietnam vet, triple amputee, and former U.S. senator—on the roots of the crisis, and what needs to be done.


March 5, 2007 - The controversy touched off by an investigative series in The Washington Post on the state of the military health-care system is growing. At a congressional hearing Monday, military officials said they were checking conditions at other hospitals—not just Washington’s Walter Reed, where the Post uncovered run-down living conditions for soldiers and mismanagement. Several congressmen also addressed the bureaucracy at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where a Newsweek investigation turned up long waits for veterans seeking medical care and disability payments.
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Max Cleland, a former Georgia Senator and a Vietnam veteran, has a unique perspective on the health care issue. He was treated at Walter Reed nearly 40 years ago after losing two legs and an arm in a grenade blast in Vietnam. Later, he headed the Department of Veterans Affairs during the Carter administration. In the past two years, Cleland has gone back to Walter Reed for therapy as the Iraq war reignited old traumas from Vietnam, a trend among veterans of that conflict. Cleland spoke to Newsweek’s Dan Ephron.

NEWSWEEK: How surprised were you by the revelations about Walter Reed?
Cleland: If the average member of Congress and average American could just walk through the corridors of Walter Reed and see what I see when I go up there, they would demand that the president stop this war. Walter Reed is the ugly face of the Iraq war. It is a face that the American people need to see because this administration from the beginning never planned to deal with casualties, never planned for the consequences of this war.

Did you see Building 18 in your visits there over the last two years?
I never saw Building 18 but it sounds like the thing ought to be on the demolition list. You can’t put troops in such conditions and you can’t put them in a permanent holding status. These people are stacked up like cordwood. It’s unbelievable.

How did this happen?
What has happened is that Walter Reed, like the Veterans Administration, is drowning in war and yet they are operating with a peacetime staff. These doctors and nurses stay up all night in surgery with these kids coming in from Landstuhl (Germany) and they try to save their lives and heal their wounds. But they cannot stem the flow of casualties and so they’re overwhelmed. And then you add the fact that this administration put Walter Reed on the base closing list and you understand why it went to the bottom of the list in terms of maintenance and renovation and in terms of money.

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