‘If Iraq don’t kill you, Walter Reed will’

[unhappycamper]

‘If Iraq don’t kill you, Walter Reed will’
By ANNE HULLand DANA PRIEST
The Washington Post
Posted on Tue, Mar. 06, 2007

WASHINGTON — The guests of Mologne House have been blown up, shot, crushed and shaken, and now their convalescence takes place among the chandeliers and wingback chairs of the 200-room hotel on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Oil paintings hang in the lobby of this strange outpost in the war on terrorism, where combat’s urgency has been replaced by a trickling fountain in a courtyard.

But the wounded of Mologne House still are soldiers — Hooah! — so their lives are ruled by platoon sergeants. Each morning, they must rise at dawn for formation, though many are slowed by pain meds and sleeping pills.

In Room 323, the alarm goes off at 5 a.m., but Cpl. Dell McLeod from Chesterfield County, S.C., slumbers on. His wife, Annette, gets up and fixes him a bowl of instant oatmeal before going over to the figure curled in the bed.

~snip~

One day, he’s led onstage at a Toby Keith concert with dozens of other wounded Operation Iraqi Freedom troops, and the next, he’s sitting in a cluttered cubbyhole at Walter Reed, fighting the Army for every penny of his disability.

McLeod, 41, has lived at Mologne House for a year while the Army figures out what to do with him. He worked in textile and steel mills in rural South Carolina before deploying. Now, he takes 23 pills a day, prescribed by Walter Reed’s doctors. Crowds frighten him. He is too anxious to drive. When panic strikes, a soldier friend takes him to Baskin-Robbins for vanilla ice cream.

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[izzie]

1. I think this is as old as wars are. Bad treatment of the men who

got hurt. I would think we would had become better at their care. I am not sure Reed is a vets hospital but I am sure it is a service hospital and having used those for years I found they were pretty good and far above just reg. hospitals in care. I am some what one sided on this having used them for 40 years. I never had to use a vets hospital and only once a army hospital that turned out badly. I also had this to aid me. Staff, meaning I was a depended of a staff member, on my records and children's. I am sure it helps.