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Walter Reed chief fired; critics say more must go

When the Army’s top medical officer, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, fired Maj. Gen. George Weightman on March 1 in response to problems with housing and medical evaluations of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, it triggered one of Washington’s favorite sports — the blame game.

Editorial: Blame at Walter Reed

Weightman arrived at Walter Reed as commander only last August. By then, a Government Accountability Office report had already laid out the problems with the Army’s medical evaluation system that occurred between 2001 and 2005, and an inspector general investigation was underway that ultimately found 87 problems with the medical evaluation system.

Those well-documented problems occurred during the tenure of Maj. Gen. Kenneth Farmer, now retired, who was at Walter Reed from 2004 to 2006, and Kiley, now the Army surgeon general, who served as Walter Reed chief from 2002 to 2004 — and who fired Weightman.

The blame game has caused a stir on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said the problems won’t be fixed by firing one general.

Weightman’s dismissal “is a welcome step, but it doesn’t change the fact that our injured troops are … facing bureaucratic nightmares,” Murray said. “We need more than empty rhetoric and administration fall guys — we need a plan to provide for our heroes.”

The same day that Weightman was relieved, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., called for yet another general to step down.

“It’s clear that General Kiley, the surgeon general at the Army, knew about the conditions at Building 18,” she said, referring to the facility just off the Walter Reed campus where some outpatient troops are housed.

But soldiers, lawyers and lawmakers say the blame may need to go yet higher up the chain, as the problems have been known about for years — through soldier complaints, congressional testimony, and the investigations by the GAO and the Rand Corp.

“The chain of command knew about this,” Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Military Times. “There is no way they didn’t know. In 2004, we knew soldiers were carrying the paperwork through the snow. Firing Weightman is not enough. Congress needs to find out who knew and clean house.”

Congress added a couple of provisions to the 2007 Defense Authorization Act in hopes of helping soldiers through the process — including better training for counselors in the physical evaluation board system, and a requirement that board members document the medical evidence behind service members’ disability ratings, rather than denying them by simply writing “pre-existing condition.”

Military Times also reported problems with the physical evaluation board system in June, while several other papers reported problems as they wrote stories about individual soldiers.

So why all the attention now?

“People are seeing it as a conglomerate now — an accrued set of grievances,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told Military Times in a March 1 interview.

He said he and his staff had heard anecdotes of problems, but that no one seemed to know how widespread they were.

“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “It makes me very angry to see another generation coming through with the same fight we thought we had won.”

Kerry referred to the work veterans did after Vietnam to make sure soldiers were cared for physically and mentally.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Mike Parker also finds it frustrating. For at least two years, he has gathered thousands of pages of documents — which he shared with Military Times — and banged on doors trying to get the problems he saw fixed. He spends much of his free time trying to help soldiers through the process.

But he also spent time alerting lawmakers and speaking before the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission — which has heard testimony from doctors in the disability rating system who say much needs to be done to help soldiers.

In March 2006, Parker filed a complaint with the inspector general at Walter Reed asking for an investigation of whether the medical evaluation boards were following the law, and another complaint with the Army’s Human Resources Command.

He said the Army is supposed to rate injuries according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Schedule for Rating Disabilities, but charged that Army officials wrote their own regulation in the mid-1990s that allows them to rate disabilities differently — and at lower percentages. No other service has such a regulation.

When Parker filed a complaint asking about the legality of that regulation, the Human Resources Command Inspector General’s Office sent him a reply stating that the issue was “not within our purview.”

“It took them 10 months … to tell me there’s a regulation that says [the Army] can do it,” Parker said, shaking his head and laughing. “No shit, Sherlock.”

Meanwhile, he said, he was told last spring that the Army inspector general was reviewing the whole system — which Army officials verified this week. The IG asked him to provide documentation from the cases he had looked at.

“I did,” he said. “But then they told me to stop, saying, ‘We’ve already talked to people — it’s not a problem.’”

He has letters documenting the responses.

Another complaint resulted in a “final response” that he hadn’t provided enough information for an investigation — even though Parker never appears anywhere without PowerPoint slides packed with information.

“I’ve hit them time after time,” he said. “I can show you back to March 1, 2006.”

So then he started hitting Congress, where the response was often disbelief.

“That’s typical,” Parker said. “It is hard to believe.”

The Army response to media coverage of the problems seems to have loosened things up — though the blame, he said, is rolling downhill.

Soldiers in Building 18 reported that their first sergeant and platoon sergeants would be replaced within a month.

But several soldiers told Military Times in December that those were exactly the people who were trying to fix things, and that they were brought in specifically to solve some of the problems in January 2005.

Pvt. Martin Jackson, of the 1st Armored Division, spent almost two years in the Medical Hold Unit recovering and waiting on paperwork. Though he complained extensively about the physical evaluation board system, he praised his noncommissioned officers.

“Now we have formations once a day and we don’t have to hunt down our platoon sergeant,” as they had to before 2005, Martin said. The current first sergeant is “the first one here and the last to leave. The platoon sergeants you have now? They actually care. With the new [company] commander and first sergeant, there’s been a big turnaround.”

Spc. Karl Unbehagan, of the 3rd Infantry Division, also spent several months at Walter Reed and remembers what it was like before the new first sergeant.

“The platoon sergeant was in medical hold with mental issues,” Unbehagan said. “He’d answer your questions between slugs of Cold Duck. If it weren’t for our [current] direct chain of command, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done.”

Sen. Kerry said the platoon sergeants shouldn’t take the fall for a command issue.

“Everything I’ve heard is how wonderful they are,” he said. “I don’t see it as an NCO problem. I see it as being a command top-down problem.”

Related reading:

Army denies patients face daily inspections

Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet

Walter Reed soldier wins small victory

Gates’ candor on hospital woes lauded

Pentagon names members of Walter Reed panel

Renovations underway at Walter Reed

Wounded and waiting