I mentioned to a friend that I’d written about this: well, what I said was that I had talked about it a bit, but could not screw up the courage to offer any interpretation. His response was, to paraphrase, ‘with the economy no one has any interest in what’s happening to these soldiers.’

This might be the case, but I think one other reason that this story does not have the immediate traction that the Feb. 2007 Washington Post stories did is that the issues here are so fuzzy. At Walter Reed the public could latch onto what they thought the main points were: substandard housing, and lack of accountability to patients. But, I think, the larger point of the 2007 problems was missed: the moral and bureaucratic challenges of what to do with soldiers facing the complex dilemmas posed by the kinds of poly-traumatic injuries that they had sustained.