There’s nothing temporary about Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s newest apartments for sick, injured and wounded soldiers.
The base on Monday opened the doors to a $53 million, 408-soldier barracks built to provide comfortable quarters for soldiers in Lewis-McChord’s Warrior Transition Battalion.
The new living units will give some permanence to soldiers who have shuttled from portable housing to renovated rooms in decades-old barracks that weren’t built for people with serious disabilities.
“This represents a remarkable and significant improvement for wounded service members, and it was the right thing to do,” said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, who spoke at the barracks’ dedication.
Monday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony showed off the new building to political and military leaders who helped win funding for its construction. The apartments themselves won’t be furnished and open to occupants until September.
They expand the battalion’s capacity to house wounded soldiers in the base by nearly 200 beds. Currently, more than half of 450 soldiers assigned to the battalion must live off base.
The new building also brings the barracks closer to Madigan Army Medical Center, where sick and wounded soldiers have regular appointments. Delays in getting to medical appointments have been a source of frustration for soldiers who have passed through warrior transition units in recent years.
Next year, the base plans to open a $16 million warrior transition headquarters building near the new apartments. Soldiers assigned to the battalion will find services for their families at the headquarters, as well as their leaders’ offices.
The new barracks are set up as two-bedroom apartments, mostly with shared bathrooms and living spaces. They have hardwood floors, kitchens and private washing machines. They’re built around a courtyard with picnic benches and barbecue grills.
Forty-two of the apartments are built to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act – almost double the 24 now available for disabled veterans in the Warrior Transition Battalion.
More than 44,000 service members have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. Those numbers caught the military off guard earlier in the wars. The Army in 2007 was embarrassed by reports showing poor care for veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., which was recently closed.
That scandal prompted the military to reorganize its services for so-called “wounded warriors” and to invest in facilities like the one at Lewis-McChord.
“It was because of Walter Reed. We had to fix this up,” Dicks said during his tour of the new apartments with Washington Democratic Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray.
Soldiers assigned to facilities like this go through a process to determine whether they will stay in the military or move on to civilian life – and if they do leave, how much disability pay they’ll receive.
That process can take months or more than a year as soldiers seek to redefine their lives.
“Unlike most soldiers home from war, these soldiers still have a fight to win,” said Col. Dallas Homas, commander of Lewis-McChord’s Madigan Army Medical Center.
Lawmakers pledged to protect services like the new barracks even as they turn their focus to cutting government spending.
Murray, who last week was named co-chairwoman of a congressional supercommittee charged with recommending $1.5 trillion in budget cuts, called the long-term care promised by the warrior transitions part of the “cost of war.”
“It is a big challenge and one we have no choice but to step up to if we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam generation,” she said.
She wouldn’t say after the ribbon-cutting how defense cuts would play into the supercommittee’s discussions, but she said “these are they types of resources we need more of.”
Adam Ashton: 253-597-8646
adam.ashton@thenewstribune.com
