Tom examines the crisis at Walter Reed VA hospital, where Dana Priest's Washington Post investigation found rats and falling plaster, and Bob Woodruff's ABC special documented traumatic brain injuries going undertreated. The VA reports 23,000 injured veterans; other sources count over 200,000. Tom, who witnessed Vietnam veteran neglect and worked in state mental hospitals, calls this a collective moral failure demanding congressional action.
Well, hi, it's Tom. Any of you who have watched any of my videos before know that I don't make political videos. Not that I don't have political opinions, I do. I just don't make videos about politics. In particular, I've never made a video about the Iraq War, and this video is not about the Iraq War. This is a video about the men and women who are fighting and have fought in the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and who have been physically and psychologically wounded as a result of that action. Now, if you've been paying attention here in America for the last 10 days or so, you've seen some pretty extraordinary things. First of all, on February 18th, The Washington Post printed an article by a reporter by the name of Dana Priest, and that article described conditions in an outpatient VA facility on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Hospital, which were deplorable conditions. Veterans, some of whom had suffered severe brain injury, um, in conditions with rats, plaster falling down, leaky showers. I'll post a link to the article over here in the description. There's been a lot of outrage in America as a result of this. Last night, ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff, who you recall, you may recall, was seriously injured while reporting on the war, very serious traumatic brain injury, returned with an hour special, returned to television with an hour special describing not just his own recovery and continued recuperation, but the conditions that veterans are facing today when they return from the war. Now, there are some things about this situation that are personally relevant because, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm of an age where I was eligible for the draft in Vietnam, in the Vietnam era. I was a student, a college student at the time of the war. I opposed the war like many of us did. I fortunately didn't have to make a decision. I say fortunately for me, didn't have to make a decision about whether or not to go to Vietnam. Because of deferments, I was never called to go. But I did watch what happened to veterans who returned from that war. And, um, it was probably one of the more shameful moments in my lifetime of our country's history, as we as a nation treated our veterans coming back from Vietnam not as if they had risked their lives doing something that our country had, in some cases, forced them to do, at the least encouraged them to do, but also we just simply turned our back on those veterans. We wanted to forget that war. And in order to do so, we didn't want to have to acknowledge them. It was a sad chapter. It's still a sad chapter. And there are many veterans of that conflict, of that war, who are still suffering as a result of their service. It's also personally relevant to me that when I watch the stories and listen to the stories coming out of the current exposés about the Veterans Administration. It reminds me of my days of working in an institutional setting. I worked for 7 years in state mental hospitals for the seriously mentally ill when I was a young man. And During that time, what I saw was a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Individual people trying very hard to serve the people that we were charged with serving, that we had chosen to serve, became dulled to the experience of the people that we were treating, the people whose care we were duty-bound to manage. And I watched people forgotten and lost, people who were mistreated, rarely intentionally, but often uncaringly mistreated. Now we see, according to the report on Bob Woodruff's piece last night, over 200,000 veterans who are suffering from some kind of injury that's pursuant to their service in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The official government figures are 23,000. I don't understand the discrepancy. What I heard was, well, there are two different agencies at work here reporting numbers. The Veterans Administration and the Defense Department. It doesn't wash. It doesn't wash. And the problem, the problem that I had and the problem that I continue to have is that we are in a situation where young men and women are putting their lives on the line, putting themselves in jeopardy, And we are failing them. We are failing them. The government isn't failing them. The Veterans Administration isn't failing them. We're failing them. We're failing them by not insisting that they get the very best care that's possible. We're failing them by saying, Institutional bureaucracy cannot take precedence over the care that human beings deserve. We're failing them by not saying this isn't going to happen anymore. It happened once. It happened once in my lifetime. It can't happen again. So I guess I'm making this video because I'm urging us all to do whatever we can to be sure that this kind of bureaucratic mess does not prevent people who have served honorably from receiving the kind of care that they deserve. Um, Whatever concrete action each of us can take, we should take. Certainly Congress is going to be very energized as a result of the publicity that this issue has gotten over the last couple of weeks. We can't let this issue die. We can't let these people down. Um, we owe it to them. And we have to do more than what we've done so far. So, um, thanks very much, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this because I think this is an issue that deserves our attention. So take care.
