Behind the walls of Ward 54

[bluedog]

sorry if this has been posted before...notice date......February 18, 2005 this treatment of sldiers has been on going and the bush administration is totally responisble!




Ward 54
They're overmedicated, forced to talk about their mothers instead of Iraq, and have to fight for disability pay. Traumatized combat vets say the Army is failing them, and after a year following more than a dozen soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, I believe them.

By Mark Benjamin

Pages 1 2 3February 18, 2005 | Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment. Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq.


But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'


lots more



http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/02/18/walter_reed/index.html

[EFerrari]

1. KIck

:mad:

[back2basics909]

2. It's time for liberals to buy "support our troops" ribbons...

... on mass. Remind those idiots who really was supporting the troops and who was not.