Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., doesn’t talk about the Walter Reed problem.

“We call it the Walter Reed syndrome,” she says in an interview, “because we think it’s systemwide.”

And Murray, the daughter of a disabled World War II veteran and a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, has been talking about it for a while – long before the Washington Post reported on the mold-infested building at the D.C. military hospital. She’s had repeated fights with the Bush administration over the Veterans Affairs Department health budget, warned that the extent of post-traumatic stress disorder was being underestimated, and is now taking the lead in Senate Democrats’ response to the issue.

“I’ve been saying almost since the start of the war that there is a cost we cannot ignore, and that’s the care of men and women after they return home,” says Murray. Veterans being treated in military hospitals, she says, “have become the forgotten stepchildren of the war.”

And in the transfer from military to VA hospitals, she says, there is a “transition breakdown.”

When Washington, D.C., finally notices a problem, it does it in a sudden rush. Tuesday, when the Senate Democrats announced an effort to address the problems, President Bush also announced that former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration, would lead a thorough investigation into the entire veterans treatment system.

At the same time, the Army announced that it would send teams of inspectors to 11 Army hospitals in seven states, including Madigan Army Hospital at Fort Lewis outside Seattle.

Murray thinks there’s a lot to find out. Since the story broke, her office has been hearing from lots of people in the military – none of them wanting to go public, since they want to stay in the military – with stories about problems in the system.

Congress has been having considerable difficulty even getting reliable numbers on war injuries and disabilities, she says. Head injuries in particular are badly monitored and tracked, she says.

“I have asked the Department of Defense regularly to give me the numbers, and they have not given them to me,” Murray says. “(Defense Secretary Robert) Gates promised me the numbers in a week, and that was more than a week ago.”

Partly, she thinks, the military doesn’t look hard enough for head injuries. “In an explosion, people three or four vehicles back can be affected,” says Murray. “Nobody picks up on it until they get home, and their wife says, ‘How come you can’t remember appointments?’ “

The Senate Democrats’ proposal includes extended oversight of the problems, making them a focus of the terrorism meetings between congressional leaders and the White House, and putting more money for them into the supplemental appropriations bill to pay for the war.

Inescapably, the bill is going to be very high, and payable over decades. The time to start paying it has arrived, and it is not open to default.

This is the back end of an entire war’s worth of miscalculations.

If you’re certain that the war is going to be small and quick so your force only has to be small and quick, you don’t anticipate tens of thousands of horrific casualties.

If you have to play catch-up with armor and security, the money has to come out of something else.

If you’re certain that the fighting is in its “last throes,” you don’t plan for casualties as a continuing problem.

If you’re determined to have major tax cuts while fighting a war you call vital to defending your society, the money is going to run short somewhere.

“Since the beginning of the war,” says Murray, “the administration has low-balled the cost of it.”

Inescapably, it’s time to finally look away from the alluring original estimate and begin to pay the actual bill.

Starting with the costs for the people who’ve already paid.