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The Mad Monk
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of Ice Cream
Mar 2000
time: 23:31
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http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3.htm
quote:
Sick, wounded U.S. troops held in squalor
By MARK BENJAMIN, UPI Investigations Editor
FORT STEWART, Ga., Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see doctors.
The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day.
"I have loved the Army. I have served the Army faithfully and I have done everything the Army has asked me to do," said Sgt. 1st Class Willie Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation Company. Buckels served in the Army Reserves for 27 years, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and the first Gulf War. "Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army has changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen."
Since getting back from Iraq in May, Buckels, 52, has been trying to get doctors to find out why he has intense pain in the side of his abdomen since doubling over in pain there.
After waiting since May for a diagnosis, Buckels has accepted 20 percent of his benefits for bad knees and is going home to his family in Mississippi. "They have not found out what my side is doing yet, but they are still trying," Buckels said.
One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart -- home of the famed Third Infantry Division -- as heroes on their return from Iraq, approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses.
The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls "medical hold," while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result.
Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others described waiting weeks or months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment.
The soldiers said professional active duty personnel are getting better treatment while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow in medical hold.
"It is not an Army of One. It is the Army of two -- Army and Reserves," said one soldier who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which she developed a serious heart condition and strange skin ailment.
A half-dozen calls by UPI seeking comment from Fort Stewart public affairs officials and U.S. Forces Command in Atlanta were not returned.
Soldiers here estimate that nearly 40 percent of the personnel now in medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing condition," prior to military service.
Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in rows of rectangular, gray, single-story cinder block barracks without bathrooms or air conditioning. They are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds in each barrack.
Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches through the sandy dirt to a communal bathroom, where they have propped office partitions between otherwise open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is full of bugs, because many windows have no screens. Showering is in a communal, cinder block room. Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper.
They said the conditions are fine for training, but not for sick people.
"I think it is disgusting," said one Army Reserve member who went to Iraq and asked that his name not be used.
That soldier said that after being deployed in March he suffered a sudden onset of neurological symptoms in Baghdad that has gotten steadily worse. He shakes uncontrollably.
He said the Army has told him he has Parkinson's Disease and it was a pre-existing condition, but he thinks it was something in the anthrax shots the Army gave him.
"They say I have Parkinson's, but it is developing too rapidly," he said. "I did not have a problem until I got those shots."
First Sgt. Gerry Mosley crossed into Iraq from Kuwait on March 19 with the 296th Transportation Company, hauling fuel while under fire from the Iraqis as they traveled north alongside combat vehicles. Mosley said he was healthy before the war; he could run two miles in 17 minutes at 48 years old.
But he developed a series of symptoms: lung problems and shortness of breath; vertigo; migraines; and tinnitus. He also thinks the anthrax vaccine may have hurt him. Mosley also has a torn shoulder from an injury there.
Mosley says he has never been depressed before, but found himself looking at shotguns recently and thought about suicide.
Mosley is paying $300 a month to get better housing than the cinder block barracks. He has a notice from the base that appears to show that no more doctor appointments are available for reservists from Oct. 14 until Nov. 11. He said he has never been treated like this in his 30 years in the Army Reserves.
"Now, I would not go back to war for the Army," Mosley said.
Many soldiers in the hot barracks said regular Army soldiers get to see doctors, while National Guard and Army Reserve troops wait.
"The active duty guys that are coming in, they get treated first and they put us on hold," said another soldier who returned from Iraq six weeks ago with a serious back injury. He has gotten to see a doctor only two times since he got back, he said.
Another Army Reservist with the 149th Infantry Battalion said he has had real trouble seeing doctors about his crushed foot he suffered in Iraq. "There are not enough doctors. They are overcrowded and they can't perform the surgeries that have to be done," that soldier said. "Look at these mattresses. It hurts just to sit on them," he said, gesturing to the bunks. "There are people here who got back in April but did not get their surgeries until July. It is putting a lot on these families."
The Pentagon is reportedly drawing up plans to call up more reserves.
In an Oct. 9 speech to National Guard and reserve troops in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bush said the soldiers had become part of the backbone of the military.
"Citizen-soldiers are serving in every front on the war on terror," Bush said. "And you're making your state and your country proud."
-0-
Mark Benjamin can be contacted at mbenjamin@upi.com
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I do hope some of those billions are going towards better medical care. 
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Static Universe
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quote:
Originally posted by Oerdin
N\It's not just the reserve officers. There's a running joke in the reserves that only a dead man has an Army Doctor as his primary doctor. The only people who work as a military doctor are the people who can't make it in the civilain world, seriously. The percentage of military doctors who can no longer practice civilian medicine due to malpractice is very high. Many of them get fired or lose their insurence due to malpractice and their options are to either change vocations or become a military doctor and get 1/4 the pay. |
No argument there.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:31
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Yeah, you can *****. Anything you say or do disappears down a big black bureaucratic hole.
The big problem now is that post 'Nam, the military decided that a lot of it's support functions will come primarily or exclusively from the reserves, but they have not reformed the reserves structurally since WW2.
Basically, the reserves used to be places for sad sacks who you could con into sticking around because they got to play soldier, so that just in case the **** hit the fan somewhere, you had instant speedbumps until the draftee army got put together. That characterized a lot of the early Korean war, between the first row of speed bumps (occupation forces in Asia) and the regular draftee Army.
Now, you have a generally professional regular military (with some horror story ****ups like docs and dentists, etc.), and a reserve component that should function the same way, but it's still the same type of (dis)organization it was 50 years ago - and it's still a bastard child to the regular forces.
A good first step would be splitting FORSCOM into two equal commands - one for regular forces in CONUS, and one to oversee all Reserve and National Guard matters.
Once you have a four star regular army command, you can then set about reforming the entire system.
Meanwhile, some things being done at Stewart are assinine - there's a shortage of docs to treat the regulars and reservists in transit and the medical holds, so the medical holds should be split out to different bases nearer their homes and reserve units.
Any time there is a disability claim, and you don't have pieces visibly missing (and sometimes, even when you do), there is an institutional mentality to find any ****ing excuse you can find to claim the disability is non-service related. In my dead brother's case, he had an 18 year fight on disability, and when he died, the VA (different organization, same mentality) spent more money by far denying service related cause of death and fighting appeals that it would have cost in survivors benefits to his widow and their kids.
Army docs in general are abysmal - they come in getting O3 pay, which is about a tenth what they'd get on the outside, but they are immune from liability. There's also a real shortage of docs qualified to deal with secondary traumatic injuries (that's mostly OJT after the casualties start coming in from Germany), and with infectious diseases, virology, etc. It's no excuse, because the Navy (at least at Navy hospital in San Diego) contracts with civilian docs who work in real hospitals.
It is entirely possible to distribute these patients out to multiple bases, and to get them proper care under contract at civilian medical facilities. It is simply a command failure to do so, from the top down.
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:31
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Assuming you had the means and the authority to fix the problems, I'd rather have a little come to Jesus chat with the bitter beyond redemption. Start fixing the problems and offer them gentle encouragement (size 11-EEE Corcorans in my case  ) to be part of the solution, or make examples of them after I started fixing the problems, to encourage their replacements to be part of the solution.
If you sack them immediately, you just look like a p***k. It's important for the troops' future performance to understand why you're a p***k. |
That's smart. If you've got to sh!tcan some people you should get as much mileage as possible out of them by way of example, and as you and Napolean (IIRC) have said before, they can serve as an example pour les outres.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Apropos to nothing...
I used to ride to drill with my platoon sergeant. He was actually one of the few senior NCOs who didn't have a major morale problem, and amazingly he had an MOS that was actually pertinent to the unit. Anyway, we were driving to drill one weekend and he started *****ing about having to wait in line at the convenience store the night before behind a black lady (and he didn't use the word black or lady) who was buying a bunch of lottery tickets. The clerk was typing in her numbers one after another, and the line at the counter was huge. I was aghast, and sat in stunned silence as this piece of white trash used the N word in his sorry little story. I could see the whole story before he finished it, how blacks were inferior and wasted their welfare money on lottery tickets etc. ad nauseum. I caught myself drifting on this line of thought and checked back in as he finished his little story.
"Finally she gets her last ticket and I get to the front of the line and say, gimme 10 quickpicks." 
That dumbass was only pi$sed off because she didn't use the random number function to buy her lottery tickets, but instead wanted to play "her" numbers. I laughed uncontrollably at his little story, and I'm sure that he thought I was laughing with him. Wrong!
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Static Universe
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quote:
Originally posted by Sprayber
I know there are lots of horror stories but during my recent depolyment I found the doctors at Fort Sill to be very professional on how they conducted themselves. At first there was a problem with records and such but over all the doctors there acted better than a lot of civilian doctors I have been too. |
There are some very good doctors serving in the army, especially if you're stationed at a base large enough to support a decent hospital or one that does medical type training.
Unfortunately, most of the poor doctors seem farmed out to deal with soldier inprocessing or screening sick call or doing physicals, and this is where most of the diagnostic, early treatment and medical record problems begin. These doctors tend to be simply incompetent to deal with anything except prescribing you Motrin.
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Static Universe
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quote:
Originally posted by laurentius
Cant you sue them? |
As far as I understand it, a U.S. serviceman cannot sue the government or military under any circumstances related to their military service, including healthcare.
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shawnmmcc
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However, there is another issue. Members of the military consistantly vote Republican and conservative. To fund tax cuts, especially since the Gingrich House back in the 1990's, support services have been "contracted out" and veterans benefits reduced whenever politicians thought they could get away with it.
The Bush administration has taken this to new lows, rescinding Clinton administration initiatives to go out and encourage veterans to take advantage of their benefits. The Bush administration is not your old traditional Republican party - they support a leaner, meaner military, which translates to fewer Main Battle Tanks, and more Stryker light combat vehicles, which are deployed easier (read more cheaply) and could not pass the required heavy machine gun ballistics test (read a 50 caliber HMG will penetrate them). But heck, we'll still deploy them, with little armor appliques that might work rather than flunk them. Since an RPG 7 shaped charge round will penetrate them, we'll deploy them with screen cages to pre-detonate them, we hope (and if not, well, it's only one crew that dies). I guess General Dynamics gave the Bush Reelection Committee enough money.
To translate, this means more casualties but hey, they aren't our kids! As long as veterans and serving military members let the current Republican leadership off the hook on how they treat veterans and vote as a group Republican, then they will be treated like crap. Make the Neoconservatives worry, and maybe some of those tax cuts can instead go to taking care of the individuals who put themselves at life's risk for their country. Genuine tradional values.
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19-10-2003 14:11
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