Oregon Public Broadcasting

Top Army brass flew to Washington state Tuesday to meet with injured members of the Oregon National Guard just back from Iraq.

Some of those citizen-soldiers have complained about inadequate care at the hands of Army medical teams at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. As Austin Jenkins reports, the allegations have reached the Secretary of the Army and members of Congress.

You could tell this was a big deal by the convoy of Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans parked outside. Inside, two top Army officials flanked by local commanders faced the cameras and microphones.

Peter Chiarelli: "I will tell you it's the first time that the Secretary of the Army has asked me to fly out because of complaints."

General Peter Chiarelli is the Army's Vice Chief of Staff. He and Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker were dispatched to Joint Base Lewis-McChord to make a strong statement. The Army will not tolerate the second-class treatment of National Guard and Reserve soldiers.

Several injured Oregon Guardsman have alleged they were rushed through a medical checkout process at Lewis-McChord after getting back from a ten-month deployment to Iraq.

Specialist Chris Bond of Eugene is one of them. He injured his knee during training before even leaving for Iraq.

Chris Bond: "We were actually doing convoy training and we were unloading 50 caliber machine guns and I had extra barrels for the machine gun and it was heavy and I kind of jumped down onto a ledge to get off the vehicle and I twisted and bent my knee backwards."

Bond says he wasn't about to let a knee injury keep him from going to Iraq. So he suffered through the deployment with the help of cortisone shots.

But when he returned home last month Bond wasn't happy with the care he received at Lewis-McChord. He got back the results of an MRI, but for the rest he says he was on his own.

Chris Bond: "The part where I got screwed is when the orthopedic told me I need surgery, but they weren't going to do it."

Bond has a saying about the Army: "They break you, they fix you." But he and other Oregon Guardsman complain that while they face the same dangers as full-time soldiers, but don't get the same level of care.

Here's why this matters: guardsmen who are sent home often lose their active duty pay. That's a problem if they're injured and can't go back to their civilian jobs.

Joint Base Lewis-McChord Commander Charles Jacoby has ordered an inquiry into the allegations made by the Oregon Guardsmen.

Charles Jacoby: "To find out if there's substance to that. Because that's not who we are. We are not a Post, we are not a major treatment facility here where that's our culture. So what we find that may be wrong, we're going to fix it."

Part of the problem could be a policy that was actually meant to help Guard members. There's a seven day window to process them and get them back home to their families. But General Chiarelli says the seven day rule doesn't work in the case of soldiers who have deployed multiple times and come home with a multitude of mental and physical injuries.

These allegations come at a time when Joint Base Lewis-McChord is bracing for a surge of soldiers returning from war – as many as twenty-thousand are expected this summer.