[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 116 (Tuesday, July 18, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7074-H7075]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


             REMARKS TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLVER. Mr. Speaker, I wish to address my remarks to the President 
of the United States today.
  Mr. President, you have taken some truly courageous stands in foreign 
policy. Your finest hour, I think, came when you insisted that Haiti 
get its chance at democracy. You insisted that the military junta, 
which had overthrown the first freely elected President in Haiti's 
history, must leave. There was nothing to be gained politically. All 
the polls said not 3 percent of Americans thought we should get 
involved in Haiti, and there was great risk to American lives. But you 
did it because it was right.
  And your courageous decision to recognize Vietnam, what a gutsy thing 
to do, the right thing to do. But you will be vilified to your dying 
day by those who want to prolong the agony of the division which the 
Vietnam war caused in America. Never mind that 25 years have passed. 
Never mind that the MIA's from World War II numbered more than all the 
dead in Vietnam, yet Germany and Japan were our closest allies 25 years 
after the Second World War. Never mind that very prominent, decorated 
heroes of that war confirm your decision is the right one.
  ``The War Is Over. Life Goes On.'' That is the title of a poignant 
column by William Broyles, Jr., in the New York Times on Sunday, July 
16. Mr. Speaker, I will place the text of that column in the Record, 
which is about Vietnam, but also about Bosnia.

                [From the New York Times, July 16, 1995]

                   ``The War Is Over. Life Goes On''

                       (By William Broyles, Jr.)

       Representative Randy Cunningham burst into tears last week 
     at a Congressional hearing on the recognition of Vietnam. Mr. 
     Cunningham, a California Republican who had been shot down as 
     a Navy pilot in Vietnam, was so overcome with emotion 
     describing the deaths of his comrades that he could not go 
     on. When he recovered, he charged that President Clinton was 
     morally wrong to recognize the former enemy.
       Any one of us who fought in Vietnam knows the emotions 
     Randy Cunningham must have felt: the deep grief and anger, 
     the sense of loss, the pride, the whole confusing mess. I 
     have wept, been to the wall on the Capitol Mall, traced the 
     names of the fallen, sought out my old comrades, worked with 
     troubled vets, helped build memorials and led parades.
       I feel for the families of the 2,000 or so Americans still 
     unaccounted for. But Randy Cunningham's tears leave me cold. 
     The grief we veterans share should be above partisan 
     politics. It is purer, more honorable and lasting. And it is 
     personal. Tears and emotion in politics fuel partisan 
     suspicions and revenge.
       Public emotion has turned Vietnam into a haunting specter 
     that has often sapped our military will. Bosnia is our 
     greatest failure of collective security since Munich because 
     we are afraid of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. But Nazi 
     aggression had little to do with the post-colonial war in 
     Vietnam, which in turn has little to do with Bosnia. The 
     Balkan tragedy does, however, have a lot to do with Munich. 
     Because our memories are so faint and our emotions so vivid, 
     we persist in applying the lessons of the wrong wars. We must 
     put Vietnam behind us.
       The Vietnam veterans who support recognition have 
     impeccable credentials: Senator John McCain, Republican of 
     Arizona, was a P.O.W.; Senator John Kerry, Democrat of 
     Massachusetts, won the Navy Cross; Senator Bob Kerrey, 
     Democrat of Nebraska, won the Medal of Honor and left part of 
     a leg in Vietnam. Does their support for recognition mean 
     they are betraying their comrades who are still missing?
       That is the hardest question, because the deep, 
     uncompromising rule of the soldier is not to leave your 
     comrades on the battlefield. But the fighting has been over 
     for 20 years. Our battlefields are rice paddles now, tilled 
     by men and women not even born when the guns fell silent. 
     There were more M.I.A.'s in World War II than the total 
     number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Thousands remain 
     unaccounted for after the Korean War. We should continue to 
     try to account for everyone. But the time has come to do so 
     in cooperation with our old enemies.
       The reason why is in the mirror. Look at us. Our hair is 
     gray, what little there is. Some of us are grandfathers now. 
     Many of us went to war 30 years ago. Thirty years! That's the 
     time between the start of World War I and the end of World 
     War II. In those earlier 30 years, more than 100 million 
     people died. Millions perished in death camps. Millions more 
     died and were never found. Tens of millions were homeless. 
     The maps of Europe and Asia were redrawn. Whole countries 
     disappeared.
       In comparison, Vietnam is a footnote. Yet we can't get 
     beyond it--supposedly because we lost. But our countryside 
     wasn't ripped with bombs, our forests defoliated, our cities 
     pulverized, our people herded into camps. We had casualties, 
     but we did not have millions of refugees and more than a 
     million dead. We weren't thrown into the sea as the British 
     were at Dunkirk.
       I never felt defeated. I just felt wasted. I would have 
     fought in World War II. I would fight today in Bosnia. But 
     where I fought was in Vietnam.
       And by now the only true response by a soldier should be 
     this: tough. As we said in Vietnam, it don't mean nothing. 
     Which meant, it means everything, but what can you do? In war 
     people die. Sometimes the best people die. We want there to 
     be a reason. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. War 
     is messy and unfair. That's why it needs a clear purpose. 
     There was no clear purpose in Vietnam. There is one in 
     Bosnia.
       Ten years ago, I visited the site of the base where I had 
     been a Marine lieutenant, just west of Da Nang. I went with a 
     man named Hien, who had been a company commander in the 
     Vietcong. We had fought each other up and down the rice 
     paddies, mountains and in the jungles. Almost all his 
     comrades were dead or missing.
       It was hard not to respect our enemies. They had been 
     bombed by B-52's, bombarded with shells hurled by 
     battleships, incinerated by napalm and white phosphorous, 
     drenched in defoliants. They had no R & R and no Medivacs. 
     They lived in tunnels and caves, never going home and getting 
     no letters for as many as 10 years.
       Hien and I met a woman whose husband had been killed where 
     I had fought. She never found his body. Most likely we 
     bulldozed him into a mass grave. That's what we did. We 
     incinerated them, buried them alive, pushed them from 
     helicopters. And they did their best to kill us. That's what 
     happens in a war. What should happen after a war is what the 
     woman said after we had talked long enough to realize her 
     husband had been killed by my platoon, possibly by me. ``That 
     was long ago,'' she told me. ``The war is over. Life goes 
     on.''
       The Vietnamese have hundreds of thousands of M.I.A.'s. 
     Soldiers trying to find the bodies of their lost comrades is 
     a constant theme in Vietnamese novels and films. Their 
     families grieve no less than ours. They know better than 
     anyone the pain we feel. We should all search together for 
     the answers that would help families on both sides finally 
     end this.
       I loved the men I fought beside. I feel pride in their 
     courage and unselfishness. But the time has come to say to 
     all my buddies who are missing, as we say to those names on 
     the wall, rest in peace. You did your best. We miss you 
     terribly.
       We fought to make Vietnam free and independent. Today it is 
     independent. And if we engage its leaders diplomatically with 
     the same will we showed against the Soviet Union, it will 
     become more free. To recognize Vietnam is not to dishonor the 
     memory of our fallen or missing comrades. It is to recognize 
     the truth. The war is over.

  Mr. Speaker, why is it so hard to do the right thing in Bosnia? 
Granted, you inherited the disastrous American position and policy in 
Bosnia's version of the Holocaust from George Bush after 20 months of 
inaction by the European Community, the United Nations, NATO and the 
United States about the most vicious war in Europe in 50 years. Granted 
that the pattern of the United Nations issuing resolutions, which it 
turned out it had no intention of enforcing and which has led to the 
total and abject humiliation and discredit of the United Nations, had 
already been set. Granted that the moral and strategic error of the 
arms embargo placed on only one side in the conflict, placed on the 
elected government of Bosnia, a sovereign nation, a member of the 
United Nations, had already been made.
  You had a reasonable, credible proposal: Lift and strike. Remember 
lift and strike? It would be a vast improvement today over the 
unconscionable cowardice of the Western democracies toward Bosnia. 
However the United Nations, the European Community, and the United 
States twist and squirm, the fact remains that Slobodan Milosevic, the 
last Communist dictator in Europe, has orchestrated the destruction of 
the most evenly multireligious, multiethnic, multicultural state in 
Europe, using the most vicious and unspeakable tactics since the 
Holocaust.
  The Serbs have shown that no tactic is beneath them. Ethnic 
cleansing, concentration camps, destruction of hundreds of mosques and 
Roman Catholic 

[[Page H 7075]]
churches, starvation of populations of Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, and 
Sarajevo, deliberate bombardment of funeral processions, children in 
playgrounds, women waiting in water lines, mass deliberate use of rape, 
slaughter of whole families and whole villages, from the youngest baby 
to the aged.
  Why is it so hard to do the right thing in Bosnia? Is there no end to 
the cowardice of the West, no end to the stupidity of an arms embargo 
on only one side in a conflict? Is there no end to the stupidity of 
never enforcing resolutions for safe havens, for no-fly-zones, for 
heavy weapon exclusion zones, and no end to the cowardice of backing 
down again and again and again, sending the clear signal to Milosevic 
and the Serb rebels that they may continue the slaughter and the rape 
and the starvation and the ethnic cleansing without fear of reprisal?
  Why is it acceptable for United Nations commanders to drink with 
Serbian war criminals? Why is it acceptable for the Serbs to drag the 
elected vice president of Bosnia from a United Nations vehicle and 
execute him on the spot? Why is it acceptable to overrun Srebrenica and 
other safe havens, drive out thousands of women and children with 
nothing but what they can carry, raping the women as they flee and 
bombarding the columns of refugees as they flee? Why is it acceptable 
for the Serbs to detain all the male Bosnians between the age of 16 and 
65? Will they ever be seen again? Not many of them very likely. Why 
will you accept this utter barbarity, this humiliation of the United 
Nations and of our closest allies, and ultimately the shame that 
inaction brings on all of the civilized world?
  Will we really accept and do nothing as Zepa, and then Gorazde, and 
then Biha, and finally Sarajevo are destroyed and all the people of 
those cities are ethnically cleansed?
  Mr. President, Americans have always done the right thing when 
confronted with such evil. Mr. President, do the right thing in Bosnia. 
You will find it is not so hard.


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