When he talks about the sludge of bureaucracy that Iraq veterans must wade through for combat-related disability pay, talks about what gets lost in the shadows inside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, about the sheer antagonism he continues to face from a government he swore to defend, James Wilson explains the details in a straightforward way, picking calmly through the minutiae. He uses the second-person. He explains it to the uninitiated with the tired patience of someone who understands because he’s been forced to, and has been compelled to make others understand.
 James and Heidi Wilson sit in the trailer James had been fixing before AHIP provided them temporary housing. After being wounded in Iraq, James Wilson spent two years at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center fighting misdiagnoses. |
Wilson enters the conference room of the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program (AHIP) in sandals and a camouflage jumpsuit and settles into his chair. He moves slowly, carefully, as if he’s nursing a broken bone or busted joint not readily apparent. "Today’s my pajama day," he drawls through a half smile, and the room swells a bit with laughter, but his words are slow and thick, the result of roadside bombs that exploded as the convoy of Humvees rolled through Sadr City, one of the most violent parts of Baghdad.
A blast threw Wilson’s head forward, where it slammed into the .50-caliber machine gun he’d been manning, splitting his Kevlar helmet. It also began Wilson’s trek through a seemingly neverending nightmare of postcombat bureaucracy that included a two-year stay at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and its Mologne Hotel, which The Washington Post, in its startling exposé of inadequate treatment of injured soldiers and labyrinthine bureaucracy, nicknamed "Hotel Aftermath." Wilson was injured in 2004. Three years later he’s still stuck in the eddies and swirls of aftermath, in a fight with the same government that promised to care for him if any harm came his way.
Hotel aftermath
For two years, Wilson languished as an outpatient at Mologne, where he was introduced to a new war. While President Bush was declaring victory in Iraq, in the Washington, D.C. military hospital wounded soldiers and their families fought the Army for health care and combat-related disability pay. Wilson lay wounded in Walter Reed for three months before his wife, Heidi, was notified that he was still alive and stateside.
Heidi had left New Orleans, James’ hometown, two weeks before Katrina struck. She was living in Texas, working at a local pizza joint, when she came home after work around midnight to a message on her answering machine from a nurse at Walter Reed. "She wouldn’t leave her name or anything," Heidi says. "She just said, ‘Your husband’s waking up and saying Heidi.’ They were trying to figure out where I was."
Heidi says she was used to being in the dark about a lot of James’ missions. James routinely called home to say his goodbyes, not knowing if they were temporary or permanent, not able to say where he was going or when he might be in contact again. James says that he was a member of the Army Special Forces, though C-VILLE was unable to confirm this by press time. Here James’ story veers onto another unexpected path. After running the initial story about James, C-VILLE received a call from Vietnam veteran John Miska, who helped James with his military discharge and disputes the fact that James was a member of Special Forces. The acrimony is obvious between Miska and James—men who share the experience of fighting for the United States, but who emerged from that service with opposing views on the military administration. To Miska, James is someone who has dug himself into a hole and is playing the role of a professional wounded soldier.
At Walter Reed, instead of immediately treating James for a traumatic brain injury, from which 60 percent of blast victims suffer, according to studies from Walter Reed, doctors took him out of the ICU unit of the hospital and placed him in Ward 54, Walter Reed’s psychiatric unit. Somewhere between Germany and Walter Reed, someone had lost James’ medical records—a common barrier many soldiers face in getting proper treatment, according to the Post.
Though James’ head was badly swollen, he was instead diagnosed as bipolar. His diagnosis was then changed to a conversion disorder, one based on a dormant pre-existing psychological state that the blast had somehow triggered. James fought these diagnoses, which would disqualify him from receiving combat-related disability pay.
"When you’re fighting [the diagnosis], they’ll try to smack it down and say it’s personality," says James, slapping down his hand as he raises it from his lap. "Then they’ll say you’re born with it. They’ll pull out all the stops to try to take away your money. And money ain’t big to me. It’s the health care."
Once Heidi arrived in D.C. on a flight James and private organizations paid for, she began fighting alongside James for proper care. Officials at Walter Reed urged her to go back home, she says. "The longer the spouses or families stay there, the more they find out how messed up it is," says James. "They try to get them to leave because they don’t want them to take care of us or fight for us."
Once again, James’ diagnosis was changed. Despite his symptoms—seizures, dizziness, short-term memory loss, vomiting, severe headaches, extreme sensitive to light—Col. James F. Babbitt, the then-president of the Physical Evaluation Board, accused James of "malingering," or lying about his condition, which was documented on Salon.com. James would not be given a disability rating, which meant no health care.
James and Heidi continued to fight the diagnosis. "I spent a couple of thousand dollars that I didn’t have to go to these neurologists and spinal cord docs to say, ‘Hey, I got injured. I’m not lying. Why would I make this up?’" says James. "They promise that if you get hurt, they’ll take care of you. But once you get hurt…" James exhales sharply, waving his hand away from him as if brushing crumbs off a table, "Have a nice day. Go find your help." ("Have a nice day" is a phrase James uses often when describing a lax write-off. It’s a bitter crack in his calm surface.)
Eventually, James was able to convince Army doctors that even though they couldn’t see them, his wounds were real. "If you’re an amputee or got a big battle wound they can see, they have to take care of you," he says. "But if it’s internal, like I had bleeding in the head, they just hide it away. All you see on TV—and I got nothing against amputees, I got a lot of friends that are amputees—all you see is them. They’re poster boys. All these bombs are messing us up in the head. But you’ll never see that."
Thanks to improved body armor, vastly faster field evacuations and the enemy’s predilection for bombs instead of bullets, more soldiers are surviving blasts—and coming back with traumatic brain injuries. In January 2006, a Salon.com story that featured James reported that military doctors and records indicate Walter Reed was being overloaded with brain-injury cases.
In 2006 James was sent to Charlottesville’s Virginia Neurocare for treatment and discharged from the Army. Heidi stayed in D.C., working at a Red Cross clothing store and visiting James whenever a nonprofit could give her a gas card. The distance was too much, and Heidi soon quit her job to come down for good, staying at a place provided by the hospital.
Things were getting financially precarious. With James unable to work and Heidi having to quit jobs to care for him, James says he and Heidi had also maxed out their credit on medical bills to prove to Walter Reed doctors that his wounds were real. Because of that, it became nearly impossible for them to rent a house or apartment. James, now discharged from the Army, had money that was supposed to come from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), but that began another struggle, navigating the complex switch from receiving his benefits from the Army to dealing with the VA. It was a struggle that would eventually put Heidi and James on the street.
The VA serves 5.8 million veterans and is stretched to its limits by two ongoing wars and sagging with a backlog of 400,000 claims. On July 17, Jim Nicholson, the
head of the VA, announced his resignation in the wake of a number of scandals, including Walter Reed, a $1 billion budget overage and the loss of files containing personal data for 26.5 million veterans and troops. The VA is an institution that is overwhelmed and can be overwhelming.
"I received two checks, but it’s a fight," says James. "I hadn’t seen one in a year and a half and then I saw one three months ago. Then the next month I didn’t see one. The next month after that I saw one. But the checks I’m receiving are only a percentage of what I’m supposed to be receiving. They aren’t the right checks. And this month I don’t have one again. It’s inconsistent."
Support the troops
Jane Andrews, the associate director of Albemarle Housing Improvement Program, has good news: The Wilsons’ stay in AHIP’s house has just been extended. She’s met James and Heidi before, but she shakes her head as they speak in turns, sometimes overlapping, cutting each other off, nodding together with occasional "can you believe it?" smiles.
 Jane Andrews, associate director of the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program, is calling on the Charlottesville community for help. "You see all the stickers on all the cars. Here’s a situation where our community can support the troops." |
"The Wilsons came to us," says Andrews, "and we didn’t know what to do. But we knew we had to do something. And now we’re trying to figure that part out. We really feel like what they’ve been through is enough to ask anybody. And they’ve given a lot. For us. The collective us. And it’s time for us to give something back to them."
The day before, James finally saw a doctor who confirmed what he’s been saying all along. "After tugging and pulling and everybody breathing down each other’s throats for three years, [the VA] finally hooked me up with a doctor who really cares," he says. She ran the same tests as the doctors at Walter Reed. Her diagnosis, however, was vastly different. "She said, ‘You have a severe head injury. They should have released pressure three years ago,’" James says.
Andrews says it’s AHIP’s goal to get the Wilsons’ in a house. She asks where they might want to live, in the city or out in the county. It’s tentative planning. Raising funds for new homes isn’t part of AHIP’s operation, but Andrews says AHIP couldn’t turn the Wilsons away just because they didn’t fit into its narrow parameters. She also knows what help AHIP can give simply isn’t enough.
"This is a failure in our federal system," Andrews says, "and it’s going to come down to the community."
It’s a community awash in resources. Hospitals, local money, nonprofits. But what is Charlottesville’s responsibility to James and Heidi Wilson? As the federal government pushes through tax cuts while an all-volunteer military fights a war that’s lasted longer than WWII, sacrifice is pleasantly abstract to most.
The Wilsons sit at the table, and everyone else tries to answer the question of how what they are enduring is allowed to happen.
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