http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/health/25warrior.html?pagewanted=all
Feeling Warehoused in Army Trauma Care Units
By JAMES DAO and DAN FROSCH
Published: April 24, 2010
...Created in the wake of the scandal in 2007 over serious shortcomings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Warrior Transition Units were intended to be sheltering way stations where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or gently process out of the Army. There are currently about 7,200 soldiers at 32 transition units across the Army, with about 465 soldiers at Fort Carson’s unit.
But interviews with more than a dozen soldiers and health care professionals from Fort Carson’s transition unit, along with reports from other posts, suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries. For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.
Some soldiers in the unit, and their families, described long hours alone in their rooms, or in homes off the base, aimlessly drinking or playing video games.
“In combat, you rely on people and you come out of it feeling good about everything,” said a specialist in the unit. “Here, you’re just floating. You’re not doing much. You feel worthless.” ...
I do not intend to criticize the Army, nor anyone else, because the article did not awaken in me a sense of outrage, rather it gave me a sense that the blinders had been removed from my eyes. For, indeed, could any rational person have expected that 3 years after the scandal at Walter Reed, that it would be possible to read this about the program designed to correct the situation? Three years. Count them.
The question for me is why the Department of Defense, which receives so much of the annual budget, cannot perform the seemingly simple task of providing for soldiers who have been wounded physically and mentally in combat?
Well, the answer lies in the complexity of the situation.
But then I answer that there are many people who devote their lives to dealing with exactly this type of complex situation. Why no have such experts design and implement the program?
Well, actually I suppose this is actually what the Army did do: lots of experts and expert inputs in order that every one's ass is covered.
I repeat, why can we not solve these complex problems, no matter how much money is available? And by "solving", I don't even mean returning one suffering individual to health, but merely the design and creation of an adequate system of procedures for doing so...as well as a system of monitoring the system, instead of having to always rely on investigative reporters.
Think of other complex situations:
Wall Street - why can't Wall Street just deliver the financial goods, without leading us to the brink of financial disaster?
Foreign Aid - once again we hear questions about Foreign Aid: why it has to be such as to destroy indigenous farming, and why the monies always end up in the pockets of the corrupt?
Education - why can't Johnny read?
Drugs - why can't we do anything to reduce and stop the demand ( not "flow" ) of drugs?
Poverty - declare a "War" on poverty!
and on and on....
These complex situations are immune to any efforts we have so far made. Obviously, we do not understand the situations. I believe we fall into what I shall call the Simplistic Fallacy when we speak of such things; i.e., our need to communicate important information about complex systems causes us to simplify those complex systems, in order that we may say anything at all to non-experts. Once having done this, the simplification into easily communicated language tends to cycle back on the complex system itself, and to reduce the apparent complexity in the minds of policy makers.
(Consider Derivatives and how often you have heard of pension funds in trouble... because they did not understand what they were doing with Derivatives.)
Briefly, we are fast losing control over our systems and our lives. The Complex is beginning to branch off in ways we never imagined, and where we have no control.
Take this Fallacy and add monetary and power incentives to it, and you have a disaster. We are loosing control of things over time, because we do not realize how complex they are: our pension funds will always end up buying derivatives, and eventually the funds go bust.
Briefly, we make up narratives that are too simple: they do not adequately render the complexity we face, and they tend to make pseudo-definite predictions ( "light at the end of the tunnel" ). Once we have done this - once we have left the area of complexity and substituted simplicity - we tend to use the simple stories and fall back on repetitive behaviors and maxims and adages.
We do not have the vigor to maintain the discipline to understand complex systems in a changing environment, so we simplify.
If you read the story, you will see this in the attitudes of some of the soldiers involved, both as soldiers under treatment and those in charge: there is a feeling of that it is somehow shameful, being away from one's "real" unit and not carrying on like a "soldier", feelings of weakness and guilt, feelings that weakness let's down one's side... we have heard it all before. Every war and its aftermath, from Hemingway to Dalton Trumbo to Nam to Iraq and beyond.. yet, we never seem to grasp what's going on with an understanding commensurate to an ability to minister to those in need of help.
Because we have lost sight of the complexity, and think it is simple, and think that a stiff upper lip will take away the pain; simple maxims replacing the impenetrable complex truths.
As difficult as new technology is, dealing with technology and weapons systems is easier than dealing with the human mind and heart. The DoD can move men and materiel, it can do logistics and logic. But it cannot heal. There is a different logic in healing, that's what "*M*A*S*H" was always preaching - the different logic of healing... and being in a milieu where decisions actually depend on emotions for their correctness.
As a society, we find it easier to deal with Tech: we often reduce History to Tech. In the story of the development of the Atom Bomb, how many of us have focused on the lives of the people involved? For most of us, the Manhattan Project was a symbol of how America gets things done. If it was and is such a symbol, our understanding of it is dangerously shallow.
All my life, I have watched all our problems evade any meaningful approach to a solution. For example, I have heard "Why Johnny Can't Read" over and over and over again. What about Derivatives? I've seen pension funds go under in 2 or 3 big sweeps so far, and I've seen the economy teetering on edge due to a $600 trillion market that's not transparent. One person in one hundred understands derivatives, and when the market is in a frenzy, even that one person acts irrationally.
Our society is dieing because we have given up our right to create human guidelines - which are difficult to devise and maintain. Our guidelines are either dead and rigid, as encapsulated within the tombs of present day religions, or are based on the simplistic language we use to communicate complex ideas.
Are paradigms shifting? Will all the unemployed be re-trained and absorbed into alternative power industries? Will the companies, lean and mean having cut away the fat of excess workers, actually be a success? Will they now meet the model of the "low-cost" producer in Indonesia? And do any of these questions mean anything at all, or are they merely NEW AGE economics and politics, the old wine dressed up in new wineskins to make us think that the ideas are of "good vintage"?
Do we have any idea how to do anything?
The Department of Defense cannot heal its soldiers, even though its budget is awash with money.
Wall Street cannot operate without seriously endangering the rest of us.
Even our regulatory agencies do not function if you give them 8 years of a GOP Congress and President. How do I know? I remember the FAA essentially grounding an airline in August of 2008 while it hurried up to do inspections it had let lapse for years.
Our demand for drugs is turning Mexico into History's first Video-Game Country...
We cannot build, because the bricks and mortar of our souls has been ignored for too long. Honor and decency and charity... the concepts do not fit into case studies; they do not fit into the concepts of Economics, Business, Politics... Suddenly the brains of economics have determined that, lo!, markets are not necessarily efficient; all it took was the destruction of your wealth to enable the professors to find that out!
We have gone into the soulless pit of the world, and we are coming up empty.
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