Bush's careless choice for Iraq vets
The president's nominee to head Veterans Affairs oversaw a military healthcare crisis long before the Walter Reed scandal.
By Mark Benjamin
Nov. 5, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- Sick and wounded soldiers back from Iraq were warehoused in dilapidated barracks, waiting weeks or even months to see doctors. Many were not getting proper treatment for one of the signature ills of this war, post-traumatic stress disorder. Buried in a blizzard of paperwork, frustrated soldiers became ensnared in an Army bureaucracy that is supposed to provide them with medical treatment and disability payments. To make matters worse, separate efforts to care for soldiers by the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs were duplicative and confusing.
It sounds like the headline-making scandal over Walter Reed Army Medical Center in early 2007, in the wake of which the Army surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, downplayed the problems. But these kinds of nightmarish struggles faced by ailing war veterans existed as far back as 2003, and were brought to the attention of Congress before Kiley's tenure. The Army surgeon general presiding over the crisis back then was Lt. Gen. James Peake, who, like Kiley in 2007, sought to whitewash the situation. Peake retired in July 2004 -- but now he's back in the news.
President Bush, who vowed this year to fix the mess with veterans care, is pressing Congress to enact a slate of reforms to help returning soldiers, including slashing the military healthcare bureaucracy and providing better treatment for those with PTSD. And just last week, Bush announced his nominee for the new head of the Department of Veterans Affairs -- retired Lt. Gen. James Peake.
Although Peake was in charge when the wheels started coming off Army outpatient care more than four years ago, there are no signs so far that the Senate will reject his nomination to head the VA now. Peake was wounded twice while serving in Vietnam and has more than 40 years of experience in military medicine, according to the White House. He enjoys the support of the American Legion, the country's largest veterans' service organization.
But others are outraged that Bush has chosen a fix-it man who presided over a broken system. "He is the wrong man at the wrong time, and Bush should be ashamed of this betrayal," said Paul Sullivan, director of Veterans for Common Sense. Until March 2006, Sullivan was a project manager at the VA in charge of data on returning veterans. "Peake has honorable military service," Sullivan said. "However, he failed in his position as surgeon general to fix the Walter Reed problem when he knew about it in 2003."
I first reported on the problems faced by outpatient veterans in an article published by United Press International on Oct. 17, 2003, while Peake was the Army surgeon general. Headlined "Sick, Wounded U.S. Troops Held in Squalor," the article exposed some of the same kinds of problems at Fort Stewart, Ga., that I would later write about at Walter Reed in Salon in 2005 and in 2006, and that the Washington Post would write about at Walter Reed in 2007. Warehoused in substandard barracks at Fort Stewart, hundreds of soldiers waited for doctor's appointments and got bogged down in the Army's disability paperwork, my October 2003 article showed. Many wounded or sick soldiers at Fort Stewart believed that the Army was trying to push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments.
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/05/peake/
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