Just so much cannon fodder

In case you thought that Walter Reed was just an isolated case of a military medical care facility that's going to be shut down anyway being neglected, guess again:

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

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Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "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. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

For the last four years, The Bush Administration, Congressional Republicans, and their mindless, grinning supporters have succeeded in painting those of us who disagreed with their policies as "unpatriotic", "treasonous", and "not supporting the troops." Even now, such accusations from Republicans have cowed Democrats as a few of them attempted to actually do something about this president's misadventure in Iraq, saying that disallowing funding for the "surge" demonstrated lack of "support for the troops."

Even now, more troops are being fed into this misadventure of a war, and once again there is no Plan B:

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq -- including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government -- senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

It is time for Washington Democrats to get off their knees, stop internalizing these false accusations, and finally act as watchdogs for the military, because God knows that Republicans don't give a shit about these kids. Republicans have made perfectly clear that they regard the young men and women who serve in the military as expendable -- just so much cannon fodder to be used for political advantage, put in harm's way without adequate equipment and then sent home under cover of night -- invisibly -- in body bags. Those who survive are an embarrassment to the Administration, so they must be hidden away in filthy and inadequate VA facilities, away from prying eyes that might question the cause for which they lost their limbs and faculties and being treated with inadequate care, lest it become necessary for corporate CEOs to perhaps have to pay a few more taxes for their care.

In the 2008 campaigns, from the Congressional level on up, Republicans are once again going to try to paint Democrats as weak on security, as not supportive of the troops. Democrats should hang photographs of the conditions at Walter Reed and other VA facilities around these necks, weighted down with anvils. Because this is what Republican policies that take the wealth of this country and stuff it into the pockets of wealthy campaign cronies and corporate executives do. This is American Republicanism in full flower. Let voters finally see what it looks like.