INSIDE the steel fence that surrounds the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre are some Q1. sights. A pile of amputated limbs sits Q2. in the sunlight. Surgeons prepare to operate with unwashed hands and filthy instruments, virtually ensuring infection. These are not scenes from the hospital itself, of course, but exhibits in the museum of military medicine in its grounds. Visitors are reminded that the current scandal over conditions at Walter Reed is hardly unprecedented
Walter Reed is America's foremost military hospital. Nearly four-fifths of the soldiers who have needed Q3. after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have been treated there. The surgery they receive is, by all accounts, superb. But the bureaucracy that Q4. them afterwards is not.
Last month the Washington Post published an exposé. It described a building housing outpatients: “Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.” Wounded soldiers needing to get their papers processed, so they could return either to active duty or civilian life, faced 16 different information systems, few able to communicate with each other. One amputee received orders to report to a base in Germany “as he sat drooling in his wheelchair in a haze of medication”.
The report sparked Q5. . Both George Weightman, the head of Walter Reed, and Francis Harvey, the secretary of the army, were Q6.. Both arms of Congress held hearings. On March 5th the House oversight committee heard testimony from John Shannon, an Q7. sergeant who was shot in the head near the Saddam Mosque in Ramadi, causing brain trauma and the loss of an eye. Wearing a patch over the empty socket, Sergeant Shannon told how he was discharged from a ward at Walter Reed and told to make his own way to an outpatient building while utterly disorientated. He spoke of a bureaucracy so Q8. that his case manager could not find him for several weeks, although he was sitting in the outpatient room where he had been sent. He said he had seen “many soldiers get so Q9. with the process that they will sign anything presented to them just so they can get on with their lives.” He suggested that this was how the government reduced the cost of caring for veterans.