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As a member of the DC Chapter and a weekly volunteer at Walter Reed, I would like to point out a couple of things.

First, anyone with a heart would like to see soldiers having relief from bureaucratic nightmares regarding their paperwork and medical care. However, I venture to say that there are few people in the United States with comparable injuries who have not also experienced a bureaucratic nightmare with their hospital and insurance company.

Secondly, the Washington Post articles citing mold and rats referred to Building 18. That building is not a medical care facility, it is a barracks. It is not on the main 116-acre campus of Walter Reed; it is a former motel across the 6-lane avenue that was purchased as an overflow residence.

Of all the approximately 120 rooms in Building 18, only 7 of them were affected by mold according to my sources, representing about 5% of the rooms in Building 18, which is only one of many, many barracks and residences associated with the Walter Reed base. The mold was caused by a bathtub overflow. The men who stay in Building 18 are on MedHold -- they are either outpatients whose injuries are not serious enough to require hospitalization or who are healed up and awaiting orders to go home or to go back into their units. Some times they drink and party on the weekends, leave pizza boxes around and other mess that would attract vermin in any city in the United States, as Coulter illustrated in her column.

Several concerned soldiers held a press conference last week attended by all the major news outlets. They wanted to set the record straight and tell their side of the story -- that they feel they are receiving great care at Walter Reed and that the original series of articles contained serious flaws and misleading claims. Did you see any articles or televised stories as a result of their news conference, which lasted over an hour? Neither did I. Even FoxNews only did a less-than-one-minute clip, according to my sources who were at the conference.

I would also like to point out that when I have been talking with soldiers at Walter Reed, I have heard complaints from two of the head-injury patients that they believed that WR does not understand the needs of head injury patients as well as those of amputees.

Two of the soldiers whose complaints were quoted in the Washington Post were head injury patients. I was fairly well acquainted with one of them and knew the other one in passing. I have also known a few civilian head injury patients over the years, including one who went on to do graduate work in brain injury and who discussed the topic with me at length; I was working as a writer about medical issues at the time.

We need to take into account that the brain is not a mechanical part like a leg or arm that may be rebuilt or to which a prosthesis may be attached. It can be greatly more difficult to assess and repair a head injury than a limb injury. Furthermore, many head injury patients experience bouts of combativeness and rage. While understandable from a psychological point of view, rage after head injury may also be a physiological response that takes an indeterminate amount of time and pharmaceutical intervention to manage and resolve. Therefore, we should allow a wider margin of credibility when evaluating the comments by Walter Reed head injury patients about their care. Instead, their angry responses have been taken as gospel by the sensationalizing news reports and waves of chatter afterwards, including on this forum.

And finally, as a householder with a nice middle-class life, I must nevertheless admit that I have had mice in both the houses I have owned at one time or another, that the mice in the City were bigger than the ones in the suburbs; and that once I had a City water main break that dumped two feet of water into my basement, rusted out my heater and clothes dryer and ruined my stored business records and clothing and my kid's baby furniture. We had rot and mold problems afterwards that took us months to clean up – none of which State Farm would cover. Yet no one took my child away nor threatened to impeach me as a parent. And no congressional oversight committee denounced anyone, nor demanded that I be repaid by the City or the insurer, because there was nothing to be gained politically by it. But there has been plenty to be gained by the fame-seeking reporters and the grandstanding politicians who could easily have visited Walter Reed countless times during the past 5 years of war – but didn't.

The exposé articles were written to embarrass the Bush administration, to worry and harass the soldiers, to give aid and comfort to the Democrat quislings in Congress and to discourage enlistments. Don't think for a moment the authoresses cared one bit about the troops. The troops were just Pulitzer-fodder for another generation of Woodward 'n' Bernstein wannabes.