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Army leaders pass around Walter Reed blame

As Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley worked to push the blame away from himself during Monday congressional hearings on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and Vice Chief Gen. Richard Cody seemed to place it squarely on Kiley’s shoulders.

At a field hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform national security subcommittee on the Walter Reed campus in Washington, lawmakers grilled four generals to find out who knew what, and when, about the problems with bureaucratic quagmires and substandard housing facing some injured outpatient soldiers at the Army’s premier medical facility.

Lawmakers seemed eager to explore whether Maj. Gen. George Weightman, former Walter Reed commander, was inappropriately fired last week — asking repeatedly if he was really the one to blame, since he was on the job less than six months.

“You probably have a little bit more blame laid at your doorstep than you deserve,” Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told Weightman.

In a wavering voice, Weightman took the blame.

“I did not walk through the building,” Weightman said, referring to Building 18, the facility just outside the Walter Reed gates that has been the focus of intense media coverage in recent weeks after it was revealed outpatient soldiers, including Iraq war veterans, were living in rundown rooms with mold on the walls, holes in the ceilings and other problems.

“It is clear mistakes were made, and I was in charge,” Weightman said.

Kiley said Weightman’s firing was appropriate, and that former Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey felt he had lost the “trust and confidence” of Weightman.

Harvey himself was fired Friday because of the problems chronicled in the Military Times, Washington Post and other media over the past two weeks.

But lawmakers wanted to know how Weightman could possibly be responsible for systemic problems in the medical retirement system, which critics — and now Army officials — say leaves soldiers in limbo for so long that they give up on proper adjudication of their disability ratings just to get out and go home.

Schoomaker said Weightman was fired specifically for the problems at Building 18 — and seemed to suggest another pair of star-studded shoulders may soon be burdened.

Schoomaker said he didn’t know about the newspaper articles about the problems with outpatient care that have emerged in the past year, or about the Rand Corp. report that documented the difficulty soldiers faced in making their way through the disability retirement system. He said he was “probably aware” of recent Government Accountability Office reports on the issues, but had not read them.

When asked who he believed should have been up to speed on that documentation and the problems detailed in it, Schoomaker said: “I would expect the surgeon general and the commanders of the regions to know about it.”

That would be Kiley. But Kiley said he didn’t know, either, explaining that when he served as Walter Reed commander from 2002 to 2004, he was “dual-hatted” as chief of the Army’s North Atlantic Regional Medical Command — as was Weightman until he was relieved of duty last week.

Kiley said he did read reports of problems, but that he was concentrating on an 80 percent return-to-duty rate of injured soldiers.

“We still have problems,” he said, “but we were still healing and returning to the force large numbers of soldiers.”

He blamed a system overcome by new injuries — those caused by improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades as well as the difficult nuances of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

But the Iraq war, subcommittee members noted, began in 2003. That, they said, should have left plenty of time to react to “new injuries,” as well as to ramp up for the steady stream of injured service members coming to Walter Reed and the disability retirement system, they said.

Schoomaker seemed to discount Kiley’s testimony, saying the Army has trained tens of thousands of medics to deal with the new injuries emerging from the war. Cody said the service moved helicopters to Iraq and Afghanistan so they could easily transport soldiers out of danger and deployed full combat support hospitals to the same areas, suggesting that if the rest of the Army could react to a wave of new injuries, perhaps the same could be expected of Walter Reed’s paperwork bureaucracy.

Schoomaker said he had heard about problems at Walter Reed one soldier at a time, but that he had always been assured they were being taken care of. “I couldn’t be madder and I couldn’t be more ashamed of the kinds of things that have turned up,” Schoomaker said.

“We’re gonna make this right. The buck stops with me.”