Walter Reed Army Hospital closes its doors

WASHINGTON -- Maj. Walter Reed's sword was symbolically handed over to the Navy at a ceremony yesterday marking the closure of the Army hospital with his name, where hundreds of thousands of the nation's war wounded have been treated for more than a century.

The tone was somber at times, but mostly celebratory, as more than a thousand former and current staff members and patients, some of them wounded troops from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in wheelchairs who have lost limbs, gathered under a white tent to say goodbye to the Army's flagship hospital.

The hospital opened in 1909 and has a storied history of care to military members, their families and presidents. President Dwight Eisenhower died there, as did Gens. John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur.

But in 2007, that reputation was scarred by a scandal about substandard living conditions for wounded troops in outpatient care. The scandal led to improvements in care for wounded throughout the military.

The ceremony honored the innovation in prosthetics and care to the nation's war wounded at Walter Reed. Most recently, more than 18,000 troops from the current wars have gone there for treatment.

Army Secretary John McHugh said Walter Reed has never been about bricks and mortar, but about "spirit and hope and compassion" that will continue after the hospital closed.

"These doors may close, the address may change, but the name, the legacy and, most importantly, the work and the healing will endure," McHugh said.

Two years before the scandal, a government commission charged with closing military bases to save money said facilities at Walter Reed needed to be modernized, and voted to close it. The main hospital in use today opened in 1977. The State Department and the District of Columbia will take possession of hospital grounds on Sept. 15.

The hospital's operations are being moved in August to new and upgraded facilities at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and at Fort Belvoir, Va. The price tag for the new facilities is $2.6 billion.

The hospital in Bethesda will be called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and it's because of that new relationship that Reed's sword was handed during the ceremony from Army Maj. Gen. Carla Hawley-Bowland to Navy Rear Adm. Matthew Nathan.

Reed was an Army physician whose research proved that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito.