The band played Waltzing Matilda, as they carried us down the gangway;But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared, then turned all their faces away

A few items for tonight. First of all, you may notice that the Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, located in the upper right, has changed. Dkon has suggested Doctors Without Borders for this month's charity, a wise choice indeed given their selfless mission and excellent efficiency in using your dollars for their intended results, not overhead. I'll let him say more about them, but they get $25 tonight from the other half of Rooted Cosmopolitans team.



Speaking of doctors, the Washington Post published a two part series this weekend about the horrid treatment of wounded US Veterans being treated as outpatients at Walter Reed Medical Center. Dana Priest, who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, and Anne Hull, wrote in part one of the series:

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It actually gets worse from there for several of the patients. In essence, while immediate medical care for veterans is outstanding, once they leave the hospital they are frequently caught in a Kafkaesque web of bureaucracy and confusion, left to fend for themselves even when suffering from debilitating injuries and psychological issues. It's become trite to say that we support the troops even when we don't support the war, but apparently the Republican leadership that controlled the purse strings for this operation believed in the exact opposite of that philosophy. Part two, which appeared yesterday, continued the story:

Some soldiers and Marines have been here for 18 months or longer. Doctor's appointments and evaluations are routinely dragged out and difficult to get. A board of physicians must review hundreds of pages of medical records to determine whether a soldier is fit to return to duty. If not, the Physical Evaluation Board must decide whether to assign a rating for disability compensation. For many, this is the start of a new and bitter battle.

Months roll by and life becomes a blue-and-gold hotel room where the bathroom mirror shows the naked disfigurement of war's ravages. There are toys in the lobby of Mologne House because children live here. Domestic disputes occur because wives or girlfriends have moved here. Financial tensions are palpable. After her husband's traumatic injury insurance policy came in, one wife cleared out with the money. Older National Guard members worry about the jobs they can no longer perform back home.

While Mologne House has a full bar, there is not one counselor or psychologist assigned there to assist soldiers and families in crisis -- an idea proposed by Walter Reed social workers but rejected by the military command that runs the post.

in response to the story, the military finally got off their butt and went into a full scale CYA operation (that's Cover your Ass, in case you were wondering). That's our military planning for you, screwing up the aftermath to make the failures of the battle itself seem so much more to scale.

Walter Reed and Army officials have been "meeting continuously for three days" since the articles began appearing, Weightman said. A large roundtable meeting with Army and Defense Department officials will take place at the Pentagon early this morning to continue talks about improvements in the outpatient system, he added.

Weightman said the medical center has received an outpouring of concern about conditions and procedures since the articles appeared and has taken steps to improve what soldiers and their families describe as a messy battlefield of bureaucratic problems and mistreatment.

"We're starting to attack how we'll fix and mitigate" some of the problems, he said.

Gee, good of them to only wait Five Frickin' Years !?!

To honor those who actually work their guts out for our soldiers after they return home wounded, another $25 will be going to The Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust, another charity given 4 stars at Charitynavigator.org. It's sad that the government can't even handle basic matters like these, but hardly surprising. So, if you happen to be reading this, and perhaps even served time in the military yourself, maybe in the Air Force, consider giving a donation and dropping a line in the comments.