Anne Hull, NF ’95

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The Post stories prompted a House hearing on hospital conditions
The Washington Post’s investigation into the neglect and mistreatment of wounded veterans and the deplorable conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center incited a public outcry and prompted a number of reforms. Hull and colleague Dana Priest spent more than four months interviewing hospital outpatients. Some declined to go public with their complaints because they feared retribution from the Army.

Hull-Nieman-30-biopicBehind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But five and a half years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely—a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients.