A day at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is an eye-opener - about our soldiers, our government generally and the Bush administration.

I visited the renowned hospital complex after The Washington Post ran a series of articles exposing serious problems at the center, where as many as one-fourth of our injured soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated.

The Post reported that soldiers are housed in deteriorated conditions of mold, mice infestations, disrepair and inadequate facilities for amputees. Depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome are often overlooked. Nightmarish paperwork stymies even the most aggressive.

What I saw was not a lack of caring or quality medical care. But I found a soldier without his legs sent in four different directions for four forms over the course of a day. His exhausted wife, near tears, was pushing him in a wheelchair through ice.

I talked with a woman whose husband has been in and out of Walter Reed for nearly two years after losing his face in war. He sat calmly waiting for yet another surgery attempting to craft features such as a nose and a lip. His wife had nothing but praise for his plastic surgeons. But she said Walter Reed's bureaucratic morass is unbelievable.

In recent days, the commander at Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, and the Army's surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, have been all over TV, saying the problems at the facility are being fixed and that they are "extremely proud" of the work their staffs are doing.

But the point is that crumbling infrastructure, inhumane bureaucracy and inadequate treatment for mental disorders have been known about for years and have been permitted to continue.

The month before the Post's series ran, a conference on "quality of life" problems faced by soldiers, their families and civilian staff at Walter Reed found a long list of "issues." They included: inadequate convalescent-leave paperwork, resulting in soldiers not getting benefits to travel as scheduled; lack of direction for emergency family care; unequal benefits based on the locale where a soldier is injured and not on the extent of injuries; and no overall plan to help wounded warriors through their convalescence.

Other problems involved the lack of child care, uniforms, military housing, parking, laundry facilities, recreational activities and cleanliness.

When former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Walter Reed, did he never seek to find out what was really going on there? On President Bush's trips there to shake hands with a few soldiers, wasn't he ever curious? When Rumsfeld and Bush were planning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, did they never think to determine how the wounded would be helped?

Walter Reed is supposed to be shut down in 2011. But facilities to handle its patients have not been built, renovated or expanded. Funds may not be scarce for cool new weapons on the design board - even "Star Wars" missile-defense technology - but they are exceedingly scarce for real soldiers.

If the Army is broken, as many believe, Rumsfeld and Bush broke it. And fixing it is proving more difficult than fixing the courageous soldiers the administration sent to war and who returned home broken.