Project Proposal: Walter Reed Army Medical Center

On Friday March 3o, 2007 President Bush visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center after the uproar about the poor living conditions and health care of the injured soldiers returning from Iraq. Bush publicly apologized and promised to fix the problems at Walter Reed for our war heroes. However, I arrived at Walter Reed on May 12, 2007 and found no improvements: only chaos. My husband was medically evacuated to Walter Reed from Germany on May 9th. He had been injured in Iraq on May 1st when two grenades struck his vehicle, shooting shrapmetal through his left check into his eye. My husband did not forgo surgery to remove the metal in his left eye until May 15th: over two weeks past his initial injury. He is now blind in his left eye because the medical staff at Walter Reed waited too long to operate on him. The metal festered in his eye, creating an infection that deteriorated the retina: the critical part of the eye that sends images to the brain creating the ability to see. The promise that President Bush Made to improve the quality of health care and living conditions at Walter Reed has not been met and has not shown signs of getting better anytime soon.
The topic I am researching is the health care and living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center of the injured soldiers returning from Iraq. This is a huge inconvenient truth for the Armed Forces and America because few people are aware of what is going on there and even less are doing anything about it. The Bush administration has just recently addressed this problem but still has not taken any steps to fix the problem. America is unaware that the large amount of tax money being spent on the war is not being distributed to important causes such as conditions for the retuning soldiers. The men and women who are sacrificing their lives are not being taken care of when they are being injured. The fact is, America is spending a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, but no one knows what it's really being used for. The inconvenient truth is that the majority of the money is going to high ranked officers who sit in air-conditioning all day while the underpaid infantrymen are being blown up from poorly-made Hum Vs because President Bush is too cheap to protect our soldiers or provide for them when they get hurt. And Bush is hiding from it, denying it, and covering it up.
From this research paper, I hope to address such questions as, were the conditions at Walter Reed bad? How bad were they? Did the American people have any idea that brave soldiers who got injured were being neglected? Did the Bush Administration try to cover-up how bad things were for the soldiers once the truth came out? And most importantly, why are the conditions bad and why isn't anything being done? I hope to answer these questions and educate my classmates about this inconvenient truth. This issue is more than just relevant to me: I lived it. I witnessed it all first hand. I could write a book on the horrible things I saw and experienced. As well as, what my husband had to go through, the other wives and families, and of course, the men and women who served in Iraq and were sent to Walter Reed.