The scandal of the Army's after-care of wounded soldiers has claimed the jobs of the secretary of the Army, the Army surgeon general and the commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The responsibility for reforming a clearly failing system now falls to the interim surgeon general, Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock.

She has an impressive resume - a nurse anesthetist, graduate degrees in business and health-care administration, 30 years in the military - so maybe she can start rectifying the daunting situation she has been handed.

But an e-mail she sent to the staff of the Army Medical Command - which was quickly leaked to The Washington Post - makes outsiders wonder if she has any kind of grip on what happened. It certainly shows a bureaucratic mentality at work.

"I know everyone is extremely pained about the media assaults on Walter Reed and our senior leaders," she e-mailed her staff.

First off, the stories in the Post weren't "assaults." They ran heavily to firsthand descriptions of the runaround the soldiers and their families were getting. And is Pollock suggesting the three top leaders lost their jobs for no reason? She had conveyed to the Post "our displeasure at the misinformation about the quality of care."

The Post's findings were confirmed by congressional hearings and that same day by the Army inspector general. If this is "misinformation," then President Bush and the secretary of defense were gullible enough to believe it.

She went on, according to the Post, to assure the staff that "the media makes money on these negative stories not by articulating the positive in life . . . " This is a variation on that kind of thinking that says the situation in Iraq would be good if only the media wrote it that way. This isn't a story of media excess such as enveloped Anna Nicole Smith.

Fix the problem. The bad stories will end.