Some comments from Anne Hull of the Washington Post while discussing how she and her partner ( Dana Priest ) put the story together on the Walter Reed mess with our veterans/troops.
It is fair to say that our troops have pretty much been treated as dirt by the higher ups!
Hull was interviewed by Bob Schieffer on "CBS NEWS' FACE THE NATION." Sunday, March 4,2007
SCHIEFFER: When you found these stories and you checked them out, did
you--did you go to the Army immediately about this, or how did you go about putting this story together?
Ms. HULL: We worked under the radar for four months. We didn't want to go to the Army. We didn't go to Walter Reed's public affairs office. We just wanted to hear the unvarnished and truthful stories of the soldiers and Marines living there. We didn't want any spin. We wanted to hear what they had to say. And normally, they might not have been as frank talking to us, but no one was listening to them for years about their problems. And so they were ready to talk.
SCHIEFFER: The thing that got everybody's attention at first were these
rat-infested, moldy rooms. But the problem, the real problem was the way these people are being treated, wasn't it? Not--not the housing.
Ms. HULL: That's right. We--we looked at Building 18 as sort of the
symbolic heart of darkness, but the real problem is the bureaucracy that these guys have to deal with. They're literally languishing for a year or two there. They have to prove they were in Iraq. The Army is in disarray. They had four years of casualties. We had one soldier who had to bring his Purple Heart to prove that he even served in Iraq. We had a medic who served three tours and had to bring in pictures of herself in Iraq to prove she served.
And every day these small insults added up to just a very hard experience for people living there.
SCHIEFFER: And it also extends beyond the military hospitals into the VA, as we have seen from this remarkable reporting that Bob Woodruff and ABC did about how these people with these serious brain injuries, they're being shuttled off to hospitals where there's no treatment for them. I mean, it's just the more you think about it, the more inexcusable it all becomes.
Ms. HULL: Right. I mean, the big surge is going to be the traumatic brain
injury, and the PTSD folks looking for services for the VA. What we found at Walter Reed is that the Army would tell these soldiers, `The VA will take care of you,' and the Army was giving them zero disability ratings quite often.
They were very eager to hand these soldiers off to the VA system.
Ms. HULL: We heard of one instance where there was a captain from the 101st Airborne, he was being discharged from the hospital. He had just hit his morphine pump for pain, and the VA woman came in to explain his disability package. They are heavily medicated there while they're getting very important messages given to them, and they are not in the right frame, often, to make these crucial decisions. And they don't have enough advocates and caseworkers to help them through the system.
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