Breaking on the internet tonight, and hitting the papers tomorrow, is the story of a Washington Post investigation of conditions faced by outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The picture it paints is not a pretty one, to say the least:

Behind 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...

...Evis Morales's severely wounded son was transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda for surgery shortly after she arrived at Walter Reed. She had checked into her government-paid room on post, but she slept in the lobby of the Bethesda hospital for two weeks because no one told her there is a free shuttle between the two facilities. "They just let me off the bus and said 'Bye-bye,' " recalled Morales, a Puerto Rico resident...

...Life beyond the hospital bed is a frustrating mountain of paperwork. The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands -- most of them off-post -- to enter and exit the medical processing world, according to government investigators. Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another. The Army's three personnel databases cannot read each other's files and can't interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases...

..."I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "...

The story does make a point of drawing a contrast between the indisputably excellent care and facilities at the inpatient hospital, and the conditions faced by those receiving outpatient services:

...While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas...

The Army's "official" side of the story is presented solely in two quick quotes:

...Army officials say they "started an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation" last October and that the problem is now at a "manageable level." They also say they will "review all outstanding work orders" in the next 30 days...

Also present in the story are a few quotes that speak to what may be the usual agenda of the WP:

..Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander at Walter Reed, said in an interview last week that a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, "because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution."..

But Wilson had had enough. Three weeks ago he turned in his resignation. "It's too difficult to get anything done with this broken-down bureaucracy," he said.

Agenda or no, it's not a flattering picture of the facility that is more or less the flagship of military medical care. Gets worse when you see the video, also at that page. Not good at all.

This is likely to be a large story once it rolls out tomorrow. There are a couple of things I'd like to say from where I sit:

1. I have never been to Walter Reed, and have heard overwhelmingly positive stories from those I know who have. I have absolutely no perspective from which to judge the accuracy of the allegations in this story.

2. If these allegations are true, there is no excuse, and it's absolutely reprehensible. If these things are true, it needs to be fixed, Yesterday.

So, read the story, watch the video, and keep your eye on the milblogs for comment from those who have more personal knowledge of what goes on at WRAMC. Chuck Z. may very well be one of those who could have something to say on the subject.