[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 42 (Monday, April 18, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
       TWO COLORADANS AMONG VICTIMS OF AIR FORCE DOWNING IN IRAQ

  (Mrs. SCHROEDER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, as a Coloradan, I rise with a very heavy 
heart today because of the 26 young people who were killed when the Air 
Force downed the helicopters. Two of those young people were from 
Colorado.
  These two young people were very, very special, and it has been a 
very hard weekend for people in my State to deal with. The first was a 
young man named Mark Ellner. He was 22 years old. He was an absolute 
straight ``A'' student, a total perfectionist, and he really felt he 
was doing something to make a great difference in the world. He also 
showed up a playfulness that some of us in the West show that people do 
not understand who are outside the West, and that is that even though 
he was a straight ``A'' student and very serious about everything else, 
he liked to dress up like Elvis Presley every now and then. So he had a 
very human side to him, and he was thrilled to be over there trying to 
help in a humanitarian mission, because he felt he would learn a lot 
and be able to serve. I am sure he felt that this would probably be the 
last thing that would ever happen to him in that theater.

  The other young man was a 33-year-old from Rifle named Rick Robinson. 
He was in the Special Forces as a medic, and he again had been thrilled 
at the privilege of being there, to go over there and help.
  I think we have many questions we want to ask about all of this, and 
I certainly hope the Armed Services Investigations Committee gets to 
the bottom of the questions that just do not seem to be answerable, the 
questions on how this could ever happen when it seemed almost foolproof 
and it seemed that it could not possibly happen.
  I think it is also part of our learning about how we are to perform 
tasks in a humanitarian mission mode rather than the normal military 
mission mode and what the differences are and what all of that means.
  To the families and to all my fellow Coloradans, this is indeed very, 
very sorrowful news, and we certainly hope that their families and 
their friends realize they did make a tremendous contribution, and that 
helping in that very difficult are in Project Comfort or Provide 
Comfort for the Kurdish refugees was indeed a very, very important 
mission.

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