As a former employee of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I can say the recent stories of disrepair and poor care are incredibly slanted. In some cases they are outright lies.

The building being described is not part of the main hospital, but is located somewhere on the 120 acre campus. I was there as recently as June 2000, and at that time the hospital was a shining gem. Nowhere in the news are the pictures of the impressive, state-of-the-art 1,200 bed hospital, the beautiful grounds, the elegant, original brick hospital (now serving as the administration building), the incredible fitness center, the museum, the church, the library or the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. It is, bar none, the world's finest location for pathology research. The centralized, extensive collection of biopsy samples, DNA and other specimens cannot be found anywhere else. It is what attracted me to come there as a civilian employee immediately following graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

When I arrived at Walter Reed, I knew it was a special facility with a well-earned reputation for excellence. It made me proud to be there.

On March 6, I spoke to my former colleagues in the Anatomic Pathology department at Walter Reed. They lamented the negative smear of the hospital and were very angry at the portrayal of that magnificent place. True, the rehab is overcrowded (which is not a decision of the hospital, but of those sending the wounded there) and a new rehab housing area is being built, to compensate. Only a few years ago the hospital was still cast in the light it deserves. It shocks me to think people can forget that or believe it could have fallen into ruin since then.

It is convenient that a facility slated for closure is being slammed, in an effort to gain public support of the decision. I guarantee the Bethesda Naval Hospital will be made into the hero of this story, since it is to be the location of a new, larger military hospital (once massive funds are spent to build it).

To date, the College of American Pathologists and the American Society for Clinical Pathology have staged a successful fight to prevent the AFIP from closing. The original decision to do so (arrived at by uninformed policy-makers) would have scattered the specimens and research projects to various universities. If the AFIP is dismantled, never again will the country have a collection of that size at its disposal, forever hindering research.

Unfortunately, most people will never see the vast complex of buildings accompanying the amazing hospital that is Walter Reed. They will only see and hear what is presented to them in the form of a specifically constructed and misleading broadcast. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the people making decisions about the hospital are not in the medical field. They are politicians who do not understand what they will be destroying.

For accurate information on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, readers can view the following Web sites: www.AFIP.org or www.wramc.amedd.army.mil.

(The writer was born and raised in Bismarck and now resides in the Boston area. - Editor)