Walter Reed Medical Center

WALTER REED MEDICAL CENTER

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Ms. NORTON. I thank you, Representative Green. I particularly thank you for opening up this special hour in a way that offers perspective, historical perspective about why the treatment of our solders and veterans mean so much to us.

What you have done is to take us through the highlights of their history, which is our history, so that I think we come to grips with why the urgency that has been revealed at Walter Reed and now increasingly at other veterans hospitals and military hospitals must be addressed right away.

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Ms. NORTON. I do want to make that distinction. Walter Reed Hospital, the Washington Post, I believe, did not find conditions to be substandard and drew the contrast between the hospital and building 18. I don't think the hospital has been the source of the problem. But they have put these soldiers in aftercare kind of apartments, in facilities like building 18. Unnamed, by the way. It could have been named after somebody. They said they are going to name it, give it some honorific name.

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for those observations, indeed. Your notion that they have got to change and they have got to change now is where we ought to be focused. You spoke about the heart-wrenching testimony, by the way, testimonies under oath. Just like the brass was under oath, so was the wife. She left her home, gave up her job to come be with her husband, has been there for months, lost in the Never Never Land of, is he going to go out on disability? Will he be returned to his company? The man had been in the National Guard for 16 years, for goodness sake.

If you are not going to tell him one way or the other what he is going to do, you're disrupting his life, you're disrupting his entire family's life, and time after time, that was the story we heard.

I want the gentleman to know, we had all the brass before us as well. You have never seen so much brass, the Secretary of the Army. We had the former commander at Walter Reed, Kevin Kiley, who has been now kicked upstairs. He is the U.S. Army surgeon general. It actually was on his watch that most of these problems emerged. We had the major general, George Weightman, who was recently fired. He had only been there 6 months, so he was the fall guy it looks like. We had the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. They all came. And, by the way, when they heard the testimony you just spoke of, they harbored their apologies to the families sitting in back of them. That's the least they could have done.

I do want you to know, I say to my good friend, that when it came time for me to ask questions, I focused on something I happened to know well, that Walter Reed in the middle of a war was put on the base realignment closing list. Think about this: Walter Reed is on the list of military installations to be closed in the middle of the war on terrorism and the Iraq war. We tried to keep that from happening.

Something very important has happened as a result of the testimony. I asked the generals, on second thought, don't you think it would have been best to postpone any notion that Walter Reed would be closed, because that sends a signal to staff, clinical staff, staff of all kinds, that if you value your careers, this is not the place to come?

And yet this is where you need the best personnel in the world. And to the man, each said, that should be rethought. And I want to say this evening to my good colleague and friend that I will be introducing tomorrow a quite unusual bill to repeal the decision to close Walter Reed in order to stabilize staff there, as a first step to say to Walter Reed: We hear you. At least we are not going to send the message to your best personnel, leave this place as soon as you can.

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Ms. NORTON. If the gentleman will yield. The Army, of course, said what it was going to do was to rebuild this massive new hospital in Bethesda. The problem with that is that it is going to take $3 billion. The gentleman and I, who serve in this House, know good and well that this House is not going to put $3 billion into bricks and mortar at a time when we have come to the floor to talk about neglect of soldiers and veterans.

So why leave it on the base closing list? Maybe it was a pipe dream that somebody had as long as they were doing BRAC last year. Now has come the time to revisit that decision, and I am very pleased to say to the gentleman that I have noted, reported in the press that Members in a position to turn around that decision, our good friend who is chair of the Defense Appropriation Committee, Mr. Murtha; his ranking member, Mr. Young; Mr. Waxman, chair of Government Reform, where these hearings were held; his ranking member, Mr. Davis; had all said, had all said in a bipartisan matter, it is not the time to close Walter Reed.

So here we are coming together at least with something to do now to stop the bleeding. Then, there are a number of other things we have to do, but that it seems to me is the minimum we can do. And there is a developing consensus; we hear the same things in the Senate today at their hearings: At least let's put, as we say in the law, an injunction on closing this hospital.

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Ms. NORTON. Would the gentleman yield on that point, to reinforce that point? At the hearing earlier this week, the generals testified that this was not for want of funds. The fact is that we have given and will give more. If you come here and you look at our Defense budget, I don't think you will see that the Congress has been stingy in coming forward with the funds to do what is necessary, at least to keep these kind of shameful conditions from taking place. And the fact that you see top flight medical care at Walter Reed itself says that, when the doctors are in charge, when the nurses are in charge, things are fine.

The leadership that you speak of, the leadership to deploy the funds correctly, the leadership to make sure that our soldiers have a seamless recovery so that, when they are in aftercare, they know they are recovering because they are treated in exactly the same way they were treated in the hospital.

Yes, you are right, I say to my good friend and colleague who knows firsthand that whatever the doctor is able to do for you in the hospital can virtually evaporate if the kind of care that is necessary is not given after release from the hospital.

I would be glad to yield to the gentleman.

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Ms. NORTON. I appreciate that the gentleman has yielded, and the contrast he is drawing between the bureaucracy and the in-hospital care. Because when you see conditions like this, here are some more direct communications.

Now, to be fair, I want to stress, and the difference between the Washington Post and these communications is we have not verified these. We don't want to say in any way that we doubt them, but we do want to say what the difference is.

Nevertheless, people have felt they had to tell us what they felt and what they knew. And here you see, again, another part of the country, the other end of the country, Fort Irwin in California. ``The room was swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table.'

Please remember, all that we are hearing about physical conditions is emblematic of an invisible bureaucracy that is much worse.

Or Fort Knox, again, in Kentucky. ``The living conditions were the worst I had ever seen for soldiers, paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses.'

Again, this one, however, these are from the Washington Post. But these they haven't verified, but they haven't gone out there.

I do want to say that when you talk to the soldiers, as I did, and here I will quote one of them. He said, ``Congresswoman, these people need help.' They did not even criticize the workers in the bureaucracy. Their sense was that they were overwhelmed.

We are talking about an invisible bureaucracy, a bureaucracy, for example, that when you have lost an arm and a leg, maybe both of them, will keep you waiting months before you can find out whether you are going out on disability or whether you are going back in some form or fashion to the Army.

And the gentleman has talked about lost paperwork, computers that don't talk to one another. The life of one soldier can be on 27 different computers. The computers don't talk to one another. Therefore, nobody can talk to the soldier.

I have suggested that we have to go with this in long-term, short-term as well as long-term ways. One short-term way would be every soldier needs his own advocate, so that, while we are fixing it, you never feel you are lost. There is somebody you can always go to.

I would be glad to yield to the gentleman.

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Ms. NORTON. I appreciate the gentleman's yielding. And I also appreciate hearing the Wounded Soldiers Act. That looks like the thinking on that even predates some of what has been revealed here.

You will notice that the President has appointed a commission. It is a bipartisan commission. It has two chairs that I think everybody would respect, Donna Shalala and former leader Dole. We often have tried to get commissions, and I would applaud the appointment of a commission largely because a commission, as I understand its charge, will look throughout the country and not focus simply on the crown jewel and will look at the bureaucracy and not simply at the peeling walls.

But I want to stress again, these soldiers need relief now, people. If you go into Walter Reed and say, ``Don't you worry, this bureaucracy, we are going to fix,' I can tell you if you are going to fix a bureaucracy where the computers don't talk to one another, you are going to be fixing that for years to come.

We have got to be able to say, it seems to me, before we go on April 2 to spring break, this we have done. I anticipate you will see some of it in the Defense supplemental. Some of it will be money. Some of it will be language. I say that without even knowing, but I know how concerned the Congress is.

And I really want to bring the ultimate analogy here, and that is to say, remember Vietnam and the Vietnam veteran. How many Vietnam veterans are homeless today, feel the terrible neglect of that war? They were draftees, but the price they have paid. And, of course, these are volunteers, which, by the way, in a real sense means we really owe them because they have stepped forward on their own. But increasingly the Vietnam analogy is used, and that analogy has some validity. The part of it that we must see does not obtain is the part that relates to how the Vietnam veterans were treated. That must be the end of that. We must show with this war that there will never be a Vietnam when it comes to treatment of the wounded and treatment of veterans. And that day begins now. And we don't have a lot of time.

This is March. We have a few weeks before we go out. I think we can do it. We may not pass the supplemental before then, but it does seem to me that we are going to come forward when I hear all of the concern with short-term solutions so that the soldiers at Fort Irwin, at Fort Knox, at Walter Reed and in your respective districts can know that help is not only on the way, it is coming, it is galloping their way.

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and let me thank him for his leadership on what I think has been a very informative special hour about our veterans.

Just to pick up on what my two colleagues have said, the chairman stresses that we are talking about veterans as well as military matters. The best example at the hearings was the decision that the poor soldier has to make about whether to take his veterans benefits or his DOD benefits and how difficult that decision is, and how some of them are just driven crazy about how you arrive at that decision, since the amounts can be very different, the kind of decision where you need somebody holding your hand all the time.

My colleague talked about poor judgment from the beginning when we went to the invasion and now when we see soldiers coming back home. I indicated earlier that a colossal example of poor judgment was closing the premier military hospital in the middle of a war.

If I could just quote in closing from Vice Chair Cody, who testified before us at the Oversight and Reform Committee hearing: ``You are trying to get the best people to come here to work, and they know in 3 years that this place will close down and they are not sure whether they will be afforded the opportunity to move to the new Walter Reed National Military Center. That causes some issues.'

Well, as I have said, we are not going to give $3 billion for bricks and mortar in the middle of a war anyway, so that is why I am introducing a bill tomorrow just to send the signal that we are not going to close this hospital.

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