Now that the scandalous gaps in the treatment of physically and psychologically wounded troops has been exposed, more and more news reports are documenting the cumbersome bureaucracy, lack of preparedness, inefficient support systems, and woeful conditions endured by all too many soldiers and their families. I, for one, have been appalled at what I have read and incensed at those whose irresponsibility and incompetence have made them responsible for this national outrage. I have also chafed at the outright hypocrisy of those who have most loudly claimed to support the troops but have, through their own ignorance or indifference, effectively failed at this task. I am weary of the whole matter. And yet the stories keep coming, and—sitting here as I am in my peaceful home, thousands of miles removed from the warfare that is occurring against my wishes but in my name—I feel compelled to read them. I want to turn away, but, in good conscience, I cannot. Here is another news article, from the New York Times:

For War’s Gravely Injured, Challenge to Find Care

When Staff Sgt. Jarod Behee was asked to select a paint color for the customized wheelchair that was going to be his future, his young wife seethed. The government, Marissa Behee believed, was giving up on her husband just five months after he took a sniper’s bullet to the head during his second tour of duty in Iraq.

Ms. Behee, a sunny Californian who was just completing a degree in interior design, possessed a keen faith in her husband’s potential to be rehabilitated from a severe brain injury. She refused to accept what she perceived to be the more limited expectations of the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

“The hospital continually told me that Jarod was not making adequate progress and that the next step was a nursing home,� Ms. Behee said. “I just felt that it was unfair for them to throw in the towel on him. I said, ‘We’re out of here.’ �

Because Ms. Behee had successfully resisted the Army’s efforts to retire her husband into the V.A. health care system, his military insurance policy, it turned out, covered private care. So she moved him to a community rehabilitation center, Casa Colina, near her parents’ home in Southern California in late 2005.

Three months later, Sergeant Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now 28, he works as a volunteer in the center’s outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels. It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.

Like the spouses of many other soldiers with severe brain injury, Ms. Behee, also 28, transformed herself into a kind of warrior wife to get her husband the care she thought he deserved. By now, there is a veritable battery of brain-injured-soldiers’ relatives who have quit their jobs and, for some extended time, moved away from their homes to advocate for and care for these very wounded soldiers during long hospitalizations.

In the eyes of five such relatives interviewed, the military health care system, which is so advanced in its treatment of lost limbs, has been scrambling to deal with an unanticipated volume of traumatic brain-injury cases that it was ill equipped to handle. Largely because of the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become a signature wound of this war, with 1,882 cases treated to date, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

In general, these caregivers said that their grievously wounded soldiers had either been written off prematurely or not given aggressive rehabilitation or options for care. From the beginning, they said, the government should have joined forces with civilian rehabilitation centers instead of trying to ramp up its limited brain-injury treatment program alone during a time of war. That way, soldiers would have had access to top-quality care at civilian institutions that were already operating at full throttle and might be closer to home.

In fact, many soldiers do have that access. But unlike Ms. Behee, many caregivers only belatedly come to understand how to negotiate the daunting military health care system. [full text]