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 [where soldiers were housed in moldy and mice-infested rooms] 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.
So, how do you improve the situations for returning service members? How do you make sure they get proper treatment? I think you ought to have a case manager and a patient advocate as you have in the private sector on every one of these casualties that comes off the plane on a stretcher. From the moment they come off that plane at Andrews Air Force Base to the time they exit…they need a case manager and a patient advocate. This happens in the private sector but you don’t have it at Walter Reed because you have a staff-to-patient ratio of one to 17. Trust me, those staff folks are overwhelmed.
But Walter Reed has had problems in the past. You described in your own memoir how soldiers coming home from Vietnam referred to it as the snake pit. There are a lot of similarities between the two eras. When I came through at the peak of the Vietnam war, all those casualties were never expected and planned for by the Johnson administration either….When I got to Walter Reed, Walter Wonderful, as we called it sarcastically, it was absolutely full. When we had to get our dressings changed, they would line us up in the hallway like on some interstate highway. That’s the impact of a system drowning in war. But this is the new Walter Reed that was built in the 80s. It was the best in the world until the Iraq war started and then the peacetime system…was very quickly overloaded.
In that case, what distinguishes this war? Most of the wounds now are due to explosive devices. They rip the body, fill the body with shrapnel, they rearrange your insides and rearrange your brains, giving rise to a whole new category of patients called Traumatic Brain Injury. So not only do you have arms and legs missing, you have your brain rearranged so that you cannot focus. You cannot think, you cannot find your way down the hall. To put people like that in situation like you find yourself at Walter Reed is despicable.
What about the VA? Why isn’t that system accommodating service members properly? The VA is going to be the larger ripple effect of this. Walter Reed is one big splash in the pond. But ultimately, they’re going to have to send the most egregious cases onto the Veterans Administration. And they’re not prepared to deal with this.
Will these hearings in Congress help? Hanging a two-star or a three-star out to dry won’t help anything. And you don’t need another damn study commission. Walter Reed appointed a study group. Then Gates appointed a study group. Now the president is calling for a study group…. Trust me, you need executive decisions, orders given, and Congressional support: stop the war, make Walter Reed the center of excellence for care in the world…and start funding maintenance and repair over there.
