http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nati...984_reed20.html
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Injured vets now battle for benefits
By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
The Washington Post
Cpl. Dell McLeod, injured in his head and spine in Iraq, was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center,
where he lived with his wife, Annette, in an outpatient residence for more than a year waiting for the Army to decide his benefit level.
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 the maimed and the newly legless sit in wheelchairs next to a pond, watching goldfish turn lazily through the water.
But the wounded of Mologne House are still soldiers. Each morning they must rise at dawn for formation, though many are half-snowed on pain meds and sleeping pills.
"It's a great day to be in the United States Army!" a sergeant tells his men.
In Room 323 the alarm goes off at 5 a.m., but Cpl. Dell McLeod slumbers on while his wife, Annette, gets up. An Army counselor taught her that a soldier back from war can wake up swinging, so she approaches from behind.
"Dell," Annette says, shaking her husband. "Dell, get in the shower."
"OK, baby," he says. An American flag T-shirt is stretched over his chest. He reaches for his dog tags, still the devoted soldier of 19 years, though his life as a warrior has become a paradox. One day he's led on stage at a Toby Keith concert with dozens of other wounded Operation Iraqi Freedom troops from Mologne House, and the next he's sitting in a cluttered cubbyhole at Walter Reed, fighting the Army for every penny of his disability.
McLeod, 41, worked in textile and steel mills in rural South Carolina before deploying. Now he takes 23 pills a day, prescribed by various doctors at Walter Reed. Crowds frighten him. He is too anxious to drive. When panic strikes, a soldier friend named Oscar takes him to Baskin-Robbins for vanilla ice cream.
"They find ways to soothe each other," Annette says.
Mostly what the soldiers do together is wait: for appointments, evaluations, signatures and lost paperwork to be found. It's like another wife told Annette McLeod: "If Iraq don't kill you, Walter Reed will."
The luckiest stay at Mologne House, a four-story structure on a grassy slope that opened 10 years ago as a short-term lodging facility for military personnel, retirees and their family members.
Then came Sept. 11 and five years of sustained warfare.
Now, the silver walkers of retired generals convalescing from hip surgery have been replaced by prosthetics propped against Xbox games and Jessica Simpson posters smiling down on brain-rattled grunts.
The hotel offers the usual amenities: daily maid service, front-desk clerks in formal vests and a bar off the lobby that opens every afternoon.
But at this bar, the soldier who orders a vodka tonic one night says to the bartender: "If I had two hands, I'd order two." The customers sitting around the tables wear 101st Airborne T-shirts or others that say "Operation Iraqi Freedom: Been There, Done That." They are missing limbs, their ears are melted off, and their faces are tattooed purple by shrapnel patterns.
Most everyone has a story about the day they blew up: the sucking silence before immolation, how the mouth filled with tar, the lungs with gas.
Those who aren't old enough to buy a drink at the bar huddle outside near a magnolia tree and smoke cigarettes. Wearing hoodies and furry bedroom slippers, they look like kids at summer camp who've crept out of their rooms, except some have empty pant legs or limbs that are pinned by medieval-looking hardware. Medication is a favorite topic.
"Paxil saved my life."
"I been on methadone for a year; I'm tryin' to get off it."
"I didn't take my Seroquel last night and I had nightmares of charred bodies, burned crispy like campfire marshmallows."
Bomb blasts are the most common cause of injury in Iraq, and nearly 60 percent of the blast victims also suffer from traumatic brain injury, according to Walter Reed's studies, which explains why some at Mologne House wander the hallways trying to remember their room numbers.
Adding insult to injury
A board of physicians must review hundreds of pages of medical records to determine whether a soldier is fit to return to duty. If not, the Physical Evaluation Board must decide whether to assign a rating for disability compensation. For many, this is the start of a new and bitter battle.
Months roll by and life becomes a blue-and-gold hotel room where the bathroom mirror shows the naked disfigurement of war's ravages. There are toys in the lobby of Mologne House because children live here. Domestic disputes occur because wives or girlfriends have moved here to care for their men. After her husband's traumatic-injury insurance policy came in, one wife cleared out with the money.
While Mologne House has a full bar, there is not one counselor or psychologist assigned there to assist soldiers and families in crisis, an idea proposed by Walter Reed social workers but rejected by the military command that runs the post.
Dell McLeod was in his 10th month of deployment with the 178th Field Artillery Regiment of the South Carolina National Guard when he was smashed in the head by the swinging steel cargo door of an 18-wheeler.
Annette took a leave from her job on the assembly line at Stanley Tools and went to live with him at Mologne House, receiving $64 a day from the Army to help care for him. That was a year ago.
Their weekdays are spent making the rounds of medical appointments, physical-therapy sessions and evaluations for Dell's discharge from the Army. After 19 years, he is no longer fit for service. He uses a cane to walk. He is unable to count out change in the hospital cafeteria. He takes four Percocets a day for pain and has gained 40 pounds from medication and inactivity.
"I'm worried about how he's gonna fit into society," she says one night, as Dell wanders down the hall to the laundry room.
Army doctors are disputing that Dell's head injury was the cause of his mental impairment. One report says he was slow in high school and his cognitive problems could be linked to his native intelligence rather than to his injury, a conclusion that would reduce his disability rating — and his disability benefits.
"They said, 'Well, he was in Title I math,' like he was retarded," Annette says. "Well, y'all took him, didn't you?"
The same fight is being waged by their friends, who aren't the young warriors in Army posters but middle-age men who left their factory jobs to deploy to Iraq with their Guard units. They were fit enough for war, but now they are facing teams of Army doctors scrutinizing their injuries.
Fame and flashbacks
One floor above Dell and Annette's room at Mologne House, 25-year-old Sgt. Bryan Anderson holds the gruesome honor of being one of the war's five triple amputees. Bryan lost both legs and his left arm when a roadside bomb exploded next to the Humvee he was driving. In any earlier war he would have been dead, but modern medicine saved him and now the tenacious and wise-cracking soldier is the pride of the prosthetics team at Walter Reed.
Amputees are the first to receive celebrity visitors, job offers and extravagant trips, but Bryan is in a league of his own. Johnny Depp's people want to hook up in London or Paris. The actor Gary Sinise, who played an angry Vietnam amputee in "Forrest Gump," sends his regards.
His room is stuffed with gifts from corporate America and private citizens: $350 Bose noise-canceling headphones, nearly a thousand DVDs sent by well-wishers and quilts made by church grannies. Two flesh-colored legs are stacked on the floor.
"Mom, what time is our plane?" he asks his mother, Janet Waswo, who lives in the room with him. A movie company is flying them to Boston for the premiere of a documentary about amputee hand-cyclers in which Bryan appears.
Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee.
Sgt. David Thomas, a 42-year-old gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform.
Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, Thomas was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.
David tangled with Walter Reed's image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A caseworker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.
When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.
On warm nights at the picnic tables behind Mologne House, someone fires up the barbecue grill and someone else makes a beer run. Wives, girlfriends and kids surround the circle of wheelchairs.
Bryan Anderson is out here one Friday. "Hey, Bry, what time should we leave in the morning?" asks his best friend, a female soldier also injured in Iraq. The next day is Veterans Day, and Bryan wants to go to Arlington National Cemetery. His pal Gary Sinise will be there, and Bryan wants to give him a signed photo.
Thousands of spectators are already at Arlington the next morning when Bryan and his friend join the surge toward the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Suddenly a series of cannon booms goes off. The last time Bryan heard this sound, his legs were severed and he was nearly bleeding to death in a fiery Humvee.
Bryan pushes his wheelchair harder, trying to get away from the noise. "Damn it," he says, "when are they gonna stop?"
Bond of brothers
An old friend comes to visit Dell and Annette. Sgt. Oscar Fernandez spent 14 months at Walter Reed after having a heart attack in Afghanistan. Oscar also had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that worsened at Walter Reed and landed the 45-year-old soldier in the hospital's psychiatric unit, Ward 54.
Oscar belonged to a tight-knit group of soldiers who were dealing with combat stress and other psychological issues. They abided each other's frailties. Sgt. Steve Justi would get the slightest cut on his skin and drop to his knees, his face full of anguish, apologizing over and over. For what, Oscar did not know.
Sgt. Mike Smith was the insomniac. He'd stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning, smoking on the back porch by himself. Doctors had put steel rods in his neck after a truck accident in Iraq. To turn his head, the 41-year-old Guard member from Iowa had to rotate his entire body. He was fighting with the Army over his disability rating and in frustration had recently called a congressional investigator for help.
To celebrate Oscar's visit to Walter Reed, they decide to have dinner out.
The talk turns to their friend Steve Justi. A few days earlier, Steve was discharged from the Army and given a zero percent disability rating for his mental condition.
Oscar is visibly angry. "They gave him nothing," he says.
After receiving a history degree from Mercyhurst College, Justi was motivated by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to join the National Guard. He landed in Iraq in 2003 with the First Battalion, 107th Field Artillery, helping the Marines in Fallujah.
"It was just the normal stuff," Justi says, describing the violence he witnessed in Iraq. His voice is oddly flat as he recalls the day his friend died in a Humvee accident. The friend was driving with another soldier when they flipped off the road into a swamp. They were trapped upside down and submerged. Steve helped pull them out and gave CPR, but it was too late.
After he finished his tour, everything was fine back home in Pennsylvania for about 10 months, and then a strange bout of insomnia started. After four days without sleep, he burst into full-out mania and was hospitalized in restraints.
Did anything trigger the insomnia? "Not really," Steve says calmly, sitting in his chair.
His mother overhears this from the kitchen and comes into the living room. "His sergeant had called saying that the unit was looking for volunteers to go back to Iraq," Cindy Justi says. "This is what triggered his snap."
Steve woke up in the psychiatric unit at Walter Reed and spent the next six months going back and forth between there and a room at Mologne House. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He denied to doctors that he was suffering from PTSD, yet he called home once from Ward 54 and shouted into the phone, "Mom, can't you hear all the shooting in the background?"
He was discharged with a disability rating of zero percent.
On some level, Steve expected the zero rating. During his senior year of college, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated with antidepressants. He disclosed this to the National Guard recruiter, who said it was a non-issue. It became an issue when he told doctors at Walter Reed. The Army decided that his condition was not aggravated by his time in Iraq and that it owed him no compensation after his four years of Guard service. The only help he would get would come from Veterans Affairs.
Beginnings and endings
About 70 wounded soldiers from Walter Reed are given free tickets to see Toby Keith in concert. Keith invites them on stage and brings the house down when he sings his monster wartime hit "American Soldier." Dell stands on stage in his uniform while Annette snaps pictures.
"Give a hand clap for the soldiers," Annette hears Keith tell the audience, "then give a hand for the U.S.A."
The Army gives Dell McLeod a discharge date. The cramped at Mologne House room has become home, and now he is afraid to leave it. His anxiety worsens. "Shut up!" he screams at Annette one night.
Later, Annette says: "I am exhausted. He doesn't understand that I've been fighting the Army."
Doctors have concluded that Dell was slow as a child and that his head injury on the Iraqi border did not cause brain damage. "It is possible that pre-morbid emotional difficulties and/or pre-morbid intellectual functioning may be contributing factors to his reported symptoms," a doctor wrote, withholding a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury.
Annette pushes for more brain testing and gets nowhere until someone gives her the name of a staffer for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. A few days later, Dell is given a higher disability rating than expected: 50 percent, which means he will receive half of his base pay until he is evaluated again in 18 months.
They are southbound on I-95 just past the Virginia line when Dell begins to cry, Annette would later recall. She pulls over and they both weep.
Not long after, Bryan Anderson also leaves Mologne House. Bryan makes the January cover of Esquire, wearing his beat-up cargo shorts and an Army T-shirt, legless and holding his Purple Heart in his robot hand. The headline says "The Meaning of Life."
A month after Bryan leaves, Mike Smith, the insomniac soldier, is found dead in his room. The Army told his wife that he died of an apparent heart attack, according to her father.
Distraught, Oscar Fernandez calls Dell and Annette in South Carolina with the news. "It's the constant assault of the Army," he says.
Life with Dell is worsening. He can't be left alone. Doctors say he has liver problems because of all the medications. He is being examined for PTSD. "I don't even know this man anymore," Annette says.
At Mologne House, the rooms empty and fill, empty and fill. One cold night an exhausted mother with two suitcases tied together with rope shows up at the front desk and says, "I am here for my son." And so it begins.
Ya know, I gotta say it. All this gets so terribly depressing. Maybe it's the winter blues, or maybe it's been too long since I drank too much and let it all go. But sometimes in times like these I wish I could once again be focused on gettin laid, and not care a whit what happens in the world, just as long as I got mine!
I guess that's the price for being aware and for having empathy.
What our government subjects these Veterans to endure, outta be a war crime.
We worry about foreign brown skinned terrorists', and we can't even satisify our basic obligations or simply do the right things for our own!
