This is so wrong, in so many ways.

While the politicians are pandering and the spinbots are shouting and every monkey in a red-white-and-blue suit is screeching "I support the troops! We support the troops!"... the torn and tattered veterans of the neocons' illegal and immoral war for conquest in the Middle East are being warehoused in Washington in conditions that most Americans would never even dream of letting their house pets live in, let alone their wounded warriors.

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.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center is supposed to be this country's flagship facility for taking care of those who have almost but not quite died in the service of their country. So why in holy hell are the much-vaunted support-the-troopers leaving them to rot in conditions that the most timid ASPCA officials would scream and shout out about, were they to find out that cats and dogs were being held in such despicable conditions in some animal shelter someplace?

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

This is just so very many kinds of wrong, in so very many ways. The Washington Post has a shock-inducing article about the WRAMC on its website today that can, and certainly should, make you mad as hell so you won't take it any more. It's way too long to quote here in detail, but please go to their website and read their Walter Reed story asap. (Fair warning: your blood pressure will go up at least 20 points by the end of the article, I guarantee.)

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

Then call your Congresscritters about it, fax your local media outlets about it, spam your buddy lists about it, shout on every blog and myspacebook page you can find about it, holler and raise hell and bang pots and pans on every street corner about it -- do whatever it takes to get the word out about this tragic travesty of so-called supporting the troops in every corner of the land.

"I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. ... I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. ... My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "

That's right kid. Suck it up. Tell it to the Marines. Because the politicians sure as hell ain't listening.

This world is invisible to outsiders. Walter Reed occasionally showcases the heroism of these wounded soldiers and emphasizes that all is well under the circumstances. President Bush, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and members of Congress have promised the best care during their regular visits to the hospital's spit-polished amputee unit, Ward 57.

"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."

This is bullshit, and all the self-serving political-hack bastards wrapping themselves in the flag and hiding behind their right-wing rhetoric and their phony support-the-troops photo ops can't possibly be allowed to get away with it any more.

It's our turn to support the troops now. So get on out there and raise hell, people. They should never have had to be there, but they were there anyway, and now they're getting treated like unwanted pets that we have to hide from the public eye.

This is so wrong, in so many ways.

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