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.
Washington Post, Sunday, February 18, 2007
Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Dear Friends,
Bldg. 18 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a commanding example of what America's best newspapers do day in, day out -- ferret out the truth and reveal impostors and masqueraders. Another visible marker of a tall-talking, low-performing, walk-doesn't-match-talk Administration. And proof positive that “congressional oversight” - i.e., (1) watchful and responsible care; regulatory supervision; (2) an inadvertent omission or error - has been too long the latter and not the former.
And, sadly, another story about us as a nation.
Like Abu Ghraib, Bldg. 18 is another metaphor from a profoundly flawed and failing military misadventure; and like Katrina, it is another shameful symbol of the inability of the government to serve its own citizens who are most in need,
It's enough to make proud citizens and resolute patriots ask: Whatever happened to the great shining city on the hill, the beacon of freedom, the land of the free and the brave, sweet land of liberty?
How could one nation -- and especially this one -- get so many important things wrong in such a short period of time? It's a question historians will be exploring for decades.
And it's our subject for today.
If we learn nothing else from Bldg. 18, it is that leadership counts -- and -- that the fish rots from the head. It was true at Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom; the Catholic Diocese of Boston and United Way; and it's the sad truth for the United States of America.
But first, let's give praise where it is due -- to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' swift, sure response to a contemptible set of circumstances, a display of leadership and public accountability that stand in stark contrast to sneering, sarcastic, stonewalling years of his uber-arrogant predecessor.
And while Army Secretary Francis Harvey is the highest placed casualty of this sordid mess -- thus far, that is -- the most significant, surgical strike was Friday morning's unambiguous dictate to dispatch the Army's smug Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, and to have in place an “acceptable commander by the end of the day.”
Talk about crispness of command and clarity of values.
The list of people who share direct responsibility for the decaying, decrepit physical plant and the disgraceful, deplorable treatment of returning soldiers is long -- stretching from The White House to the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs and on over and up to Capitol Hill.
And while it also stretches back over multiple Administrations and Congresses, it has been the unanticipated (and unfunded) impact of the Iraq war injuries that have tested Walter Reed -- and most of the rest of the VA hospital system -- beyond its tensile strength.
One would hope that Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid will follow Secretary Gates' example by clarifying what “congressional oversight” is all about and how it is to be conducted under the leadership of the Democratic majority. And the next time the Congress is found “in contempt” -- of itself, that is -- heads better roll and fast. More than a few ought to now -- staff and members -- but there is no institution more unwilling to reform itself and punish its own miscreants than Congress, a subject to which we'll return in a forthcoming TMR.
The plain truth is that the President, Vice President, and former Secretary of Defense have done nothing tangible to “support our troops,” despite all that stentorian rhetoric. Nor has Congress. Nor have we.
Together, we have spent the last five years huddling around that banal bromide -- “We support our troops.”
But only a few among us -- Don Imus and the supporters of the Fallen Heroes Fund at the Center for the Intrepid, military families, some selfless volunteers and donors, and even a few of the (former) top brass at the Pentagon, for example -- have actually done anything.
And speaking of that former Marine Corps bugler, it was Imus who brought the reprehensible reality of America's miserly military death benefits to the attention of several prominent U. S. Senators and presidential hopefuls -- Biden, Dodd, Kerry, Lieberman, McCain and Santorum - who clearly had no idea what the facts were and hadn't bothered to ask. And for the record, the one who moved with greatest dispatch to repair the problem was Pennsylvania's recently “retired” Senator Rick Santorum.
If there is anything we're learning about ourselves in this new century it is how far we are straying from our place atop the “city on the hill” -- a phrase first used by Massachusetts Bay Colony's Governor John Winthrop to described the new world.
Here's what he wrote on his way across the Atlantic:
“For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”
That was 1630. This is now.
And leaving aside whether it is “our God,” a lesser celestial power, or the overlord of another realm, Bldg. 18, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, and other misdeeds remind us that we are “deal[ing] falsely . . . in this work we have undertaken.”
And every opinion poll taken in every part of the globe is telling us that “we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”
And so we shall be. And so we are.
It's time to turn this ship around. The odor of this Administration reeks of a rotting fish. 2008 beckons. But who out on the horizon is temperamentally and intellectually fit to lead the American turnaround?
The smartest choice would be someone who's already done it somewhere, not someone who's looking for his first opportunity or her chance to cash in on a marquee family name. Or vice versa.
And from TMR's perspective, that shortens the list while raising serious questions about those early front-runners. We're in search of a workhorse not a show horse.
Some things are just too important to be left to the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In "Blsg 18 "R" Us" the author laments the terrible mistakes our country's leadership has made over the past few years. To be sure there have been awful failures and all of us are looking for the kind of leadersip that befits a great democracy. But the problem is - how do we do that? In my career I helped establish and participated in "assessment centers" for senior Federal leaders. We knew it was not foolproof - some of those who were selected went on and failed in their careers. But we did improve the track record and we did have criteria established to pick those who would be assessed. However, we are faced with a situation where the only qualification for being president is that you have to be 35 years old. So what do we look for? The author indicates that "someone who's already done it somewhere" is to be desired. But what is "it" and where is "somewhere"? I imagine you can say governors have done "it" but when you consider that our last two presidents have been governors I say we need to keep looking. Congress has failed miserably in their oversight responsibilites over the last few years so I don't think we can say they have done "it" either. If we analyze the office of the president we realize he/she doesn't run the country - they run the office of the president - and there is a difference. Perhaps character is the most important characteristic we should be evaluating. I'm not sure Lincoln or Kennedy would fare well under the "already done it somewhere" test when they launched their campaigns. There may very well be another Lincoln or Kennedy out there - the problem is recognizing that when we vote. While our current method of assessing candidates is both brutal and mean at times it may be the best way to assess someone's character.
Posted by: Gary L Wilkinson | March 11, 2007 at 04:19 PM