Anger at Walter Reed

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Anger at Walter Reed
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Henry Allen
The Washington Post

I’d guess that most veterans were as angry as I was on learning that combat-maimed soldiers have been warehoused and forgotten among roaches, rodents and mold at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

I’d also guess they weren’t entirely surprised. That’s because most veterans are enlisted. So was every one of the maltreated Building 18 soldiers and Marines quoted in The Post’s revelations of the Walter Reed mess. When you’re enlisted you get used to being treated certain ways by certain officers. Every outfit has them.

A little more than 80 percent of the military is enlisted. The enlisted are the privates, corporals, specialists, airmen, seamen and sergeants who have to salute and say “sir” to an elite called officers: lieutenants, commanders, captains, majors, colonels, generals and admirals. The officers wear the white collars, the enlisted wear blue. The two classes live on different sides of the tracks.

So a lot of veterans may well have accepted the neglect of their fellow enlisted at Walter Reed. They may even have shrugged off news that one patient had to show a Purple Heart to prove that he had served in Iraq when he asked for a uniform to replace the one he left behind on a bloody stretcher. They might not be surprised to learn of superiors chewing out Purple Heart recipients for showing up at their medal presentations in gym clothes after the military failed to provide them with uniforms. As veterans know, officers and even some senior enlisted will yell at you for things like that.

The government is investigating. It investigated the systematic atrocities at Abu Ghraib, too, and the only soldiers prosecuted were enlisted. Early on in the Walter Reed scandal, Army Secretary Francis Harvey blamed negligence on the enlisted, saying: “We had some NCOs who weren’t doing their job, period.” So it’s hard for a lot of veterans to expect that an investigation will ask about the possibility that a simple truth came into play: Officers running the hospital may have ignored the squalor their troops were living in because they believed from long experience that they could.

It turns out that this is one of the rare times they couldn’t.

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