Soldiers, vets deserve better

The living conditions at Building 18 of Walter Reed Army Medical Center were unacceptable, period. No one can make an excuse for housing soldiers - or anyone else for that matter - in conditions that included black mold, rats, cockroaches, and decaying walls and ceilings.

Fortunately, soon after the Washington Post brought attention to the woeful situation, the Army got to work doing repairs and maintenance that were long overdue.

In addition, heads have rolled. The man in charge of the hospital, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, was fired by the secretary of the Army. Then the secretary of the Army himself, Francis J. Harvey, was forced to resign later the same week.

Congressional hearings were set up within days of the initial report about the conditions at Building 18, and the president appointed former Republican Sen. Bob Dole and former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala to head a bipartisan commission to study conditions at military and veterans hospitals and to determine whether combat veterans are receiving appropriate care.

"Obviously, it's a tragedy; obviously somebody dropped the ball," said Dole, who was wounded during World War II and spent years in treatment.

President Bush also has put together a task force of seven Cabinet secretaries to determine what can be done immediately to improve veterans' care. And Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson said the Veterans Administration will hire 100 new patient advocates who will help troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the bureaucracy.

"The American people can feel very good about the health-care system that their VA is providing to veterans," Nicholson said, "but if there is a case where a veteran gets lost in the system, or suffers anxiety or their family does as a result of something we're not doing, that is unacceptable."

That is certainly the right attitude, but it is going to take more than a blue-ribbon panel, a task force and a couple of congressional committees to get things done. Care for our veterans has always been good, but never good enough.

We need to pledge to remember our debt to these citizens and remain constantly vigilant for lapses such as those at Walter Reed. Of course, there will always be bureaucratic errors and human bungling, but the Army and the VA need to establish some kind of whistleblowing hotline which allows ground-up access to someone who can make a difference.

What we don't need to do is turn a national embarrassment into a political football. It is hard to imagine why anyone would try to use the pain of these veterans and soldiers as a tool to leverage popular opinion against the president's foreign policy. Yet an Associated Press story on Wednesday noted that Democrats "said the Walter Reed problems were shining a spotlight on the administration's failed war policies."

Let's not confuse America's undebatable responsibility to take care of its veterans and active-duty military with the legitimate debate over the war in Iraq. Otherwise, we will turn those soldiers into political pawns, and that would just be one more humiliation.