[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 114 (Tuesday, July 30, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H8822-H8828]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 COMPELLING ISSUES OF NATIONAL DEFENSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk this evening--this evening, 
it is 6 at night in Los Angeles, Mr. Speaker, and only 4 in the 
afternoon in Hawaii--I want to speak tonight about one of the most 
heartbreaking, agonizing, complex stories of American history that has 
haunted me my entire life and came to another tragic conclusion this 
evening.

                              {time}  2100

  It is the story of the world's greatest Nation, the United States of 
America, the most noble Nation to ever exist, with all due respect to 
the mother country, Great Britain, to wonderful little homogeneous 
nations like Norway or New Zealand, and to a multilingual nation who 
has avoided war and persecution for almost 500 years, Switzerland.
  Given our size, the problems we have overcome, the destructive moral 
evil that destroyed our morality for our first four score and 7 years, 
then four score and 10 years, then a century, then another century of 
neglect, slavery and its aftermath, we have overcome so much. And just 
in this century, when we could have been isolationists, and were at 
first, we entered a war called the Great War. And because it broke out 
again, bringing fathers back into conflict with their own sons, World 
War II, we put Roman numeral one on

[[Page H8823]]

the Great War, where my father won three Wound Chevrons, now called 
Purple Hearts.
  World War II, the greatest cataclysm of pain and suffering and evil 
of all time, with the Communists weighing in with all of the war crimes 
and tragedy and even greater loss of life inflicted by Stalin and his 
Communist thugs, as did Hitler and his gang of cutthroats. We entered 
that. And we probably could have cut an isolationist path in spite of 
the war in the Pacific brought on us by the warlords of Japan.
  We have expended in this century more blood and more treasure than 
any nation, without any strings attached, with no territorial gain, no 
economic gain, no oil leases, in spite of what cynics said about our 
noble cause in trying to keep at least half of Indochina, Vietnam, 
Cambodia, and Laos, trying to keep them free, part of the free world, 
as we had kept half of the Korean Peninsula free at great loss of 
treasure and great loss of young life, it appears that this noble 
Nation, in this century, in all of those conflicts that we probably 
could have avoided, as immoral as that would have been, it appears we 
have left live American heroes behind to the not so tender mercies of 
their captors.
  That is what I want to talk about tonight. And to do it I will take a 
book that has been absolutely my bible on the POW crisis in Vietnam. It 
is simply called, ``POW,'' by John Hubbell and published in our 
bicentennial year, 1976, by Readers Digest Press, and read through you, 
Mr. Speaker, to 1.3 million, maybe 1.5 million now, listeners to our C-
SPAN televised preceedings.
  I am afraid that to 99 percent of the audience listening tonight, Mr. 
Speaker, they will have not heard these facts, because this wonderful 
book, ``POW,'' that was painful and yet ennobling and uplifting to read 
was not a best seller. Let me retrieve it.
  Last night, at 2 a.m. in the morning, Mr. Speaker, the Armed Services 
Committee brought down its conference report between the House and the 
Senate on the 1997 Defense authorization bill. Like most authorization 
conference reports, or appropriations conference reports, there was 
much compromise and some gnashing of teeth on both sides.
  The POW-MIA issue, frankly, took severe hits, and in this case the 
gnashing of teeth is by those families that would be described in 
scripture as ``the salt of the earth,'' who gave us their sons, their 
young fathers, their husbands to fight for freedom in Korea and Vietnam 
and were left behind.
  First, Mr. Speaker, a recapitulation of what was just proposed to all 
the conferees from the Senate and the House, of which I was one. And 
let me put a rumor to rest right now. I was a conferee at every 
meeting. I did not miss one, right down to the wire at 4:30 tonight. 
Treated with the ultimate of respect by my chairman, and I return that 
respect, the gentleman from South Carolina, Navy Captain Floyd Spence, 
a medical walking miracle and one heck of an American hero.

  Floyd Spence treated me with dignity and let me do the lead-off 
report at all the conference meetings, when my conferee status was in 
doubt with the media, and because there were so many personnel issues 
involved, he always let me lead off, as I engaged in the conference 
discussion tonight at the last lap more than anyone else.
  Here is what the Clinton administration said they were going to veto 
if it was in the final House-Senate product. They said if there was 
anything in there on demarcation of theater missile defense, they would 
veto it. They want to get by on the cheap. Even if he gets 4 more years 
he will leave office without this country being defended from missile 
attack.
  The ABM Treaty. Multilaterali- zation. If the House had prevailed, 
Clinton said he would veto it. And then two of them, the only two 
others that are what they called ``veto bait'' were Bob Dornan's, mine. 
HIV-positive discharge. I had a partial victory there. And homosexuals 
trying to join the military not being asked. Returning to the Ronald 
Reagan-George Bush policy on homosexuals in the military. Clinton said 
he would veto that.
  I think that is a big bluff. Scared the pants off the other Chamber, 
not me. Because if he was going to veto something where the conference 
of the Senate and the House said we are returning to a clear, simple, 
nonconfusing policy of no homosexuals in the military, to use Senator 
Sam Nunn's language, homosexuality is incompatible with military 
service, he would not have dared touch it. But he bluffed and we caved. 
So all of that is out.
  Homosexuals in the military is a tiny little thing. As I told some 
press people who said, ``Did you lose that one?'' I said, ``Not 
hardly.'' If you will go back on a nexus search of everything I said in 
1993, that under the Nunn-Skelton-Dornan language we got 95 or 98 
percent of what we wanted, and they are putting out more homosexuals 
now than ever in history. This year we are running at a rate of a 
thousand this year, if we continue this rate up through July. And last 
year it was 777 homosexuals were pulled out of the military. The 
highest in a decade.
  So, obviously, whatever Clinton thought he was implementing, what the 
courts are looking at is the Nunn-Skelton-Dornan language, and that was 
98 percent there. All I wanted to do was close that 2 percent gap. And 
I have been told no because Clinton bluffed on that 2 percent.
  The 2 percent was merely saying to a young man or woman, after we had 
told them, through the recruiter, we do not want to recruit homosexuals 
and then said to them, here it is in writing, and put it in front of 
them and got them to sign to it. All the gentleman from California, 
Congressman Duncan Hunter, and I wanted to do was to merely say, by the 
way, no Communist days of have you ever been, just are you now a 
practicing homosexual or do you think you ever will practice if we 
recruit you into the Army. A ``yes'' answer to those two simple 
questions and we could say politely, young man, young lady, we do not 
want you to join the military.
  That way they cannot say I was confused, I do not read too well, I 
was so scared when I was joining, or misty-eyed because I was going to 
serve my country that I did not hear all of this. Why did they not tell 
me they did not want homosexuals, it would have saved them 5 months of 
training and a waste of all these uniforms and schooling and 
everything. So I will fight that battle next year.

  On the HIV-positive discharge, I am so right on this that it hurts. 
Here is a letter from the Marine Corps. A letter from the Bureau of the 
Navy, Headquarters of the Marine Corps, Annex 2 up here. There are no, 
no Marines on active duty out of 56 who were HIV who got it from 
tainted blood or any infected tissue or blood product at all. That 
means that all 56 got it by violating rules and restrictions on off-
limit bars or houses of prostitution, which is almost zero to a 
handful, and all the rest got it by homosexual conduct or dirty drug 
needles. That means they violated military rules. It is down to about 
850 now, not a thousand.
  We are going to keep this regiment of people on active duty because 
of Clinton and the failure of this conference to face up to the truth. 
I had it passed as law on February 10, when Clinton signed the Defense 
authorization bill for this year, 5 months late. He dismissed that he 
had made us, had not bluffed, he had made us take out defending the 
homeland from one nuclear rogue missile. He had forced us to take out 
the provisions where we do not want U.S. soldiers under foreign or U.N. 
command, took that out, and he took out a provision I helped to write 
that this Congress, House and Senate concurring, decides where American 
troops serve.
  In World War I, in World War II, and it fell apart in Korea, became a 
U.N. action. It certainly fell apart after the Tonkin Gulf resolution. 
No declared war. And we had prisoners being dragged through the streets 
of Hanoi, July 6, 1966.
  The liberal Washington Post had to editorialize on Bastille Day, July 
14, that if the North Vietnamese kept continuing to treat our men as 
criminals and air pirates and were going to put them on trial and 
possibly even execute them, then the results would be absolutely 
horrendous.
  Senator Russell, who the Russell Building is named after, Senator 
Russell said we would turn North Vietnam into a desert. A lot of people 
misquote that as a parking lot. We were not going to pave it, it would 
be a desert. A moon landscape. And it worked. They never again talked 
about trying them, but they beat 20 or more to

[[Page H8824]]

death, they executed 100 in the villages, and they killed lots of 
civilians that had been captured during the Tet offensive. They kept on 
torturing our men horribly for 4 or 5 more years, but they never again 
talked openly about putting them on a public trial. But no declaration 
of was in Vietnam. It fell apart there.

  This House and Senate should lay down the constitutional hard line 
that the President in article II, section 2 is only referred to by the 
Framers of our constitution as the Commander in Chief of the forces. 
And then there is a comment, it says and when the militia, that is the 
National Guard, is called up, he is the commander there, too.
  All of the authority over the armies and the navy, they use plural 
for armies, armies and the navy, resides under article I, section 8, in 
this Congress, the House and the Senate. Foreign treaties over on the 
north side of the beltway, but both of it, and all spending and 
appropriations and tax bills over here, start here, but we share the 
authority and the control over our military in every aspect except the 
commander at the top, where only one person can speak, over the 
quality, the size of the military, how many people will be on active 
duty, whether women will or will not go into combat, whether 
homosexuals will or will not serve, what the colors of the uniform will 
be, what their weapons will be, their pistols, their rifles, their 
tanks, their artillery, their ships, their planes, their helicopters, 
and in how many numbers, and what kind of fuel they will use, and where 
we will preposition ships, and it should include where they will fight 
and die under Old Glory.
  And it should be whether we decide they will serve under a NATO 
command with a ratified treaty under SEATO, which died because we could 
not stand up to communism to the bitter and there, or in CENTO, which 
fell apart when a good man, Jimmy Carter, inadvertently cut the legs 
out from under the Shah of Iran, and then he passed away with cancer.
  This was all stripped out by Mr. Clinton on February 10. But he only 
griped about one thing that day, just 5 months and 3 weeks ago, he said 
the Dornan amendment on HIV, people carrying the fatal venereal 
disease, AIDS virus, they can disobey the law if they want and I will 
not order Janet Reno and my Attorney General to defend this law that I 
am signing into law.
  And then a few Republican lameducks around here, and a few Democrats, 
including a few that I think are utterly corrupt and brought about the 
death of people, in one case the death of a woman, they gutted this out 
of the bill, and they did it again.

                              {time}  2115

  Well, they did not get a total victory because I won as the Chairman 
of Military Personnel on something called end strength. I vowed that 
every time Clinton or any President want to keep this regiment of 
people, and I said it before and I will say it again, God love them, 
they are on a track to death. I am fighting to get the money to extend 
their lives. I want them to have good care. But they have admitted to 
me, quote, a Navy chief petty officer, ``I know I should not hold down 
this billet.'' Another said, ``I know I am not doing right by the 
military. I'm going to too many medical appointments, taking too much 
toxic medicine like AZT. I am not performing my job. I know I caused 
another man or woman to be fired when I was fired off of my aviation 
job and I have been retrained into their job.''
  Whenever Presidents want to keep HIV-positive AIDS-infected personal 
on active duty, I will always consider them of line. They can stay on 
active duty and draw pay, but I am always going to add a thousand 
people, men and women who can as healthy people be trained for combat 
and be deployed anywhere in the world, even though I do not think we 
should go there, until we wake up and decide where they should go, 
people who can be deployed, trained for combat, and do not have to take 
toxic medicines like AZT. I will keep that thousand on active duty to 
weight off against this politically protected group of people who need 
our prayers and super medical aid and should not have to play this game 
of pretending they can cut it, when in all but a few muscular cases 
they cannot, and they should be home with their families with as much 
money as they can make on active duty doing everything they can to 
extend their lives.
  I am always going to add to the end strength more people. And guess 
what, Mr. Speaker, I did not just add a thousand; I did not add 5,000; 
I added 20,000 or more over and above what Clinton wanted to cut 
military down to.
  Now, that is HIV and homosexuals in the military. I won two big ones, 
Mr. Speaker. It looks like this conference has signed off on no Hustler 
magazines, pornography and soft core pornography, if that is what you 
want to call Playboy Magazine, or Penthouse, which outsells Playboy, 
and Hustler outsells them both. This garbage, this direct assault on my 
mother who has long gone to heaven, my wife who is very much alive, 
my sisters-in law, my aunt who is alive in her 90's, and my three 
daughters and five granddaughters and maybe a sixth granddaughter on 
the way.

  Pornography is a frontal, direct, vicious, specific assault upon 
women. It treats them--well, some homosexual pornography is a direct 
assault upon boys or young men or ephebes--young men 18, 19, 20--just 
barely over the age in most States of maturity. Most pornography is a 
direct assault on women, cheapening down like slavery to a product, 
meat on a rack. And we have gotten this first behind the counters. Just 
by Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland proposing it, all these PX managers 
started to hide this stuff and make the young, macho guys who think 
demeaning women by buying this garbage is manly, and it is not. It is 
unmanly. They started hiding all of this stuff.
  Some of them with guts, practicing Protestants and Christians and 
observant Jews who work in the PX system saying, Hey, this is enough. 
Just threaten to take it out, and I want to junk it anyway. But when 
this is signed into law by Clinton, that is the end of our PX's 
facilitating pornography.
  No freedom of speech problem here. They can get it at the local drug 
store or they can keep it in their footlocker, but it helps the Navy to 
tell these guys, stop putting these graphic, gynecological exam shots 
up on the walls of the carrier hangar deck. Stop that. You can stick it 
in your footlocker and corrupt yourselves, but you are not going to put 
it on the walls.
  That helps commanders to take that, not puritanical, but strong, 
manly, decent line, or if it is a female officer, an ethically womanly 
line, to not have this garbage up. It helps by doing this. So that is a 
big victory.
  And the biggest one of all for me personally, was Clinton signed five 
Executive Orders, what the Pope called culture of death, Executive 
Orders on his first day on the job, second day in Office. January 22, 
1993, 20th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision; a lying decision 
based on a gang rape that never took place. There was not a rape that 
took place or an abortion that took place. Norma McCorvey, the Roe in 
Roe v. Wade, is now reconciled with her three daughters. Each one she 
had threatened to abort, and all of them are alive, praise the Lord. 
And she has reconciled with them and become a Christian. It took her a 
couple of steps in how hard to fly in the face of Kate Michaelman and 
Eleanor Schmiel and Patricia Ireland. But she has squared herself away 
with the Lord and that phony decision, Roe v. Wade, on its 20th 
anniversary with 35 American babies at various stages of gestation 
killed in their mother's wombs, on that 20th anniversary, Clinton, with 
a smile from ear to ear, signed those five Executive death orders. Only 
one has been reversed.
  I do not say this pridefully; I say it so they will know where to 
come and get me to try to reverse it or put some blame, the pro-
abortion movement. I reversed one of his five Executive death orders 
and he signed it into law on February 10, and the Senate tried to strip 
out and it went through conference and it is there. Why? I will give 
away a secret. Because I put in closing that 2 percent gap on 
homosexuals in the military. I knew I would not win that in this 
election year, given the complexion of both bodies. But sure enough, it 
worked. They played off that.
  If Dornan will drop the homosexuals in the military, we will leave 
his Public Law alone and that is in spite of a vote in the Senate 51 to 
45 to take out

[[Page H8825]]

Dornan's no abortions in military hospitals. So there are those four.
  There are some other things that are kind of strange. Senator Byrd 
protected two SR-71's. That is fine. We lost our Buy America. To you 
working Americans out there, Duncan Hunter of San Diego fought hard. 
Mr. Jim Traficant on this side. Try again next year.
  And then there was some other small things. One Senator put in a 
policy on nondeployables. All the nondeploy ables; not just those with 
the AIDS virus, and it was a phony attempt to counter me. Once I said I 
will accept it, they did not even want their own. They dropped it.
  We won on the House side on getting work on four beautiful F-18 
Hornet fighter aircraft. We are going to get that work done in depots 
Funding for depots is a 60/40 split on U.S. versus outside work. And 
that is the report, except for the House receding to the U.S. Senate on 
POW/MIA language.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, I will not be able to vote for the Defense 
authorization bill on this floor tomorrow if it comes up or when we 
come back in September. I will have to vote against it in spite of 
getting nine out of 11 things in the bill, in spite of being the point 
man with Owen Pickett, my Democratic vice chairman from Virginia, at my 
side on everything, including the multiple POW/MIA hearings, including 
one that lasted 11 hours and 45 minutes, half a day, with no breaks. We 
only used the breaks to come over and vote and ate on the run.
  Mr. Pickett and I stood by our men and women in uniform with pay 
increases, basic allowance for quarters, health provisions refined. 
Most of my work was on the grinding routine of the military personnel 
subcommittee, as Dan Coats of Indiana and now the new chairman, Dirk 
Kempthorne of Idaho, did so assiduously on the other side.
  But now without mentioning any names, here comes the POW/MIA tragedy, 
and what a tragedy it is.
  On February 10, again that same day that Clinton signed the Dornan 
abortion language, the HIV which was stripped out by my own party 3 
months after it was in law, a mistake, against the will of 99 percent 
of all the men and women who are at the E-1 enlisted level E-2, E-3, 
the sergeants, the NCOs and most of the field officers, all the junior 
company grade officers that I have spoken to, this House in a gutless 
move pulled it out. However we did trade it for two pro-life positions 
in what was called the continuing appropriations bill a few weeks back.

  Now, here is what Clinton signed into law: The Missing Persons Act. 
The guts of it, the core of it, basically were nine things. I will 
leave it up, Mr. Speaker, to every American who tracks us in this 
Chamber and follows the proceedings of this House. If we were debating 
this right now in the Committee of the Whole for the Armed Services 
Committee, and I was controlling the debate and yield myself such time 
as I might consume, I would march down these nine points and I would 
hope, Mr. Speaker, that all Americans would evaluate these.
  I will take them the way they were stripped out or allowed to stay, 
nine of them. I fought for three, and I held three, but six will be 
stripped out when Clinton signs this bill.
  Section 1902(a) of the 1996 Missing Persons Act designates a period 
of not longer than 48 hours for a unit commander; that is, a squadron 
commander, Marine company commander, or higher, to report to the 
theater commander in the theater. That could be very small. The 
Mayaguez, that was a small theater of action off the main port of 
Cambodia. When a person is missing, it is 48 hours for the unit 
commander to say to the theater commander, Two days ago Lieutenant 
Dornan never came back from that patrol. Only one of his radiomen made 
it back. It was 2 days ago. Let us move on this.
  Now that has been moved to 10 days. I ask any person with any logic, 
what about Scott O'Grady? Scott O'Grady came up on the radio. He told 
me this in my own office, Tip O'Neill's old district office, Tom 
Foley's old district office, Jim Wright's old district office in the 
Rayburn Building. It is my office now, and in that office he told me, I 
came up on the radio, Congressman, every night for 6 nights and nobody 
heard me. Only on the sixth night.
  Imagine, he was rescued the sixth night and nobody thought he was 
alive. I said, ``I didn't think you were alive, Scott. I gave up on 
you.'' He said, ``Don't feel bad, my mom and dad had given up, my 
sister and my brother, and so had my unit and all but a few of my 
wingmen.''
  One close friend that I met in Aviano told me that he diverted from 
another capping mission, another deny-flight mission over Bosnia, deny 
flight to the Serbians, that he flew back in the general direction of 
where Scott went down, and when he came up on the radio, he got so 
excited. They played the tapes for me there at the fighter squadron 
headquarters in that front base at Aviano, Italy. And he said, ``Is 
that really you, Scott? What was your call sign in Onsong, Korea?'' And 
he came up with it and he said, ``It is you. It is you.'' He is telling 
him, ``It is you. It is you.'' Very dramatic.

  Day six, now it has been moved to day 10. Ten days not to report that 
someone is missing? If it is your fault that someone is missing, you 
have 10 days to cover your tail.
  Number 2, section 1502(b), the theater commander after receiving a 
report from a unit command that a person is missing has 14 days to 
forward a report to the Secretary concerned, Navy, Air Force, Army, the 
Navy takes care of the Marine Corps, that all necessary actions were 
taken, that all appropriate assets were used.
  This is called accountability, Mr. Speaker, to resolve the status of 
the missing person and that all pertinent information was safeguarded. 
This new gutting of this provision has a unit commander, that can be a 
company commander on a small ship off the coast, coastal ship, 
reporting directly to the secretary of some service back in the 
Pentagon. What kind of an idiotic disconnect is that?
  This next one, number 3, is one that I managed to save. But as Jim 
Talent of Missouri said, it is worthless without all the other ones 
that are stripped out of this.
  Section 1503.4, a legal counsel will be appointed by the Secretary of 
the services, or of Defense, to represent a missing person's interest 
at all boards of inquiry. You know how this is handled most of the 
time? Go look at that movie ``A Few Good Men.'' Tom Cruise plays a 
lawyer new on the base. They gave him what they thought was a nothing 
case and he turned out to be a good lawyer and a big star, but that is 
what happens. They give to the lowest person in the Judge Advocate 
office, generally, this nonwinable case.

                              {time}  2130

  So a young captain is told, you will help this missing person's 
interests at all boards of inquiry. And he says, I do not know the 
issue. I do not know the theater. I have not been overseas yet. And 
what are the regs here? What do I base all this on?
  No teeth to back up this appointed legal counsel. I fought for it and 
got that one, but I am wondering what it is worth now.
  Number 4, 1505(b), for missing persons last known or suspected of 
being alive, a board of inquiry will be convened every 3 years after 
the initial report of disappearance. Chairman Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho 
had a good point. What about if a family does not want to have this 
brought up every 3 years, that they have made peace. They are convinced 
their son was killed, died in captivity. They want to let him rest in 
peace.
  I called it the Kempthorne provision. Good, let us have the families 
opt out. Then we made it better than that. Everybody is considered 
opted out except for those who do not think that they got justice and 
that their son, last known alive, and in the case of the gulf war could 
be a daughter now, a daughter, suspected of being alive or last known 
alive, you opt in and want to review every 3 years. Killed. Stripped 
out.
  I am telling you, Mr. Speaker, as I stand here and you sit there, the 
missing in action, POW families in your State of Colorado are 
distraught. They are enraged. They are heartbroken. They are literally 
crying angry tears that this is stripped out.
  Now, number 5, 1506, penalizes any Government official who knowingly 
willingly withholds information related to the disappearance, 
whereabouts or status of a missing person from his case file. Anyone 
who knowingly and

[[Page H8826]]

willingly, Duncan Hunter of San Diego wanted to add maliciously, they 
would not accept that, withholds information from the case files 
because their tail is on the line, the have done shoddy work about 
someone, their whereabouts, about their disappearance or their status, 
stripped out, no accountability.
  And they know that I am on the brink of bringing charges against two 
Americans who are innocent until proven guilty, but I want to bring 
charges against Robert Destat, French name, and Chuck Trowbridge for I 
think wrongfully and willfully withholding information from one of my 
best friends in the Air Force, Carol Hrdlicka over her husband.

  Remember, Mr. Speaker, I started the POW bracelet at the inspiration 
of a young 16-year-old named Kaye Hunter who then left for school in 
Taiwan the next week. She said, I want to wear a POW bracelet, when I 
had referred to this Montagnard bracelet, on the debut of the Robert K. 
Dornan show, February 7, 1970. I said that I would wear this Montagnard 
bracelet, never take it off until the POW's are accounted for. I have 
never had it off, since September of 1968. That is 28 years I have had 
this on.
  Out of this round Montagnard bracelet that I got at the little 
village of Kontum, north of Pleiku, 13,000 of these POW bracelets were 
born. And here is David Hrdlicka's, May 18, 1965, my best friend from 
the Air Force. Carol, his wife, called me at midnight last night. His 
son has gone through a full Naval career flying F-18 Hornets, now a 
first officer with American Airlines. She said, we have not lost yet. 
We are going to keep the accountability for people who knowingly and 
willfully withheld information from me. I have to tell Carol, Mr. 
Speaker, it is gone, stripped out.
  Number 6 prevents a missing person from being declared dead without 
credible proof that if a body is recovered and is not identifiable 
through visual means, a certification by a practitioner of an 
appropriate forensic science, pretty broad, a practitioner of an 
appropriate forensic science, usually a mortician, says that the body 
recovered is definitely the missing person. Stripped out. We cannot 
even get this provision through that says a credible practitioner of a 
forensic science must say, if a body is not visually identifiable, this 
is the person we are saying it is.
  Now we can go back to this routine of a chip, a bone, without even 
any DNA material to extract from it, that a little chip of a bone in a 
mass grave, as happened with the case of a C-130 crew in a terrible 
rain storm. They buried in a mass grave a bag of 10 bodies mixed 
together, pieces of bones of bodies where not one piece of one bone was 
able to identify one person. All the families were rolled on that. So 
there is number 6, stripped out.
  Now, numbers 7 and 8, I held for three out of nine. I held these. 
Section 1508 permits the primary next of kin to seek judicial review at 
a U.S. district court but only on the basis that there is information 
that could affect the status of a missing person, new information that 
was not adequately considered during the DOD administrative review 
process. That is pretty new. That means new information. And somebody 
can block new information from coming forward if it makes it look like 
he has done a shoddy job and he has nothing to worry about because we 
took out the penalty provision.
  So like the young captain being assigned as legal counsel but without 
any trail of records that he can base his research on, what is that 
worth? Now we have judicial review but people can obfuscate this thing.
  I have never been into conspiracies on this, but always been 
suspicious of people who homesteaded in this gut-wrenching tragic area 
for their whole career, giving up promotion and advancement and 
confusing the relative sometimes and then holding back information when 
the enemy was being given the information in Hanoi, but they held it 
back from the families.
  The third out of the three that I managed to hold on to was section 
1509(b)(1), which permits retroactive review of the case of missing 
persons known to be suspected of being alive or whose capture was 
possible at the end of the Korean war or cold war.
  This is an important one. If I had not gotten this back, the POW 
families from the Korean war, where we left, I always have used the 
figure in this Chamber, 389 known, healthy prisoners were left behind 
when others came across Freedom Bridge.
  Now in my research, when magazine articles from the Times 
declassified documents that terrific people at the DMPO, that is the 
Defense Missing Persons Office, have been finding at the Eisenhower 
Library and in other research documents, and tell Mr. Gudaboi or 
whatever your name is over there, you better stay out of the way of 
these honorable, hot analysts and researchers. I will get your name 
correct. I am masacring it here, but you know who you are, you are a 
financial person.
  Mr. Speaker, this financial person is not an analyst and he must not 
stop people from traveling to Russia or to anywhere else or doing their 
work at the Eisenhower Library and think that he is going to replace 
them as an analyst, when he has been an obstructionist or like Bob 
Destat and Chuck Trowbridge, you will find yourself, until this bill is 
overthrown with Clinton's signature, I am moving on this penalty 
provision while the sun is shining. I am going to bring some justice to 
these families.
  So I got the Korean war and cold war prisoners back into this because 
Col. Philip Corso, now in his 80's, I have seen him on film saying that 
he himself went in the Oval Office to a boyhood hero of mine, Gen. 
Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of only 8 five-star generals, the man who 
drove Hitler to suicide in less than 3 years and 5 months, the 
President of the United States for 8 years, one of our rare two-term 
Presidents in this century. And he said to Colonel Corso, whose heart 
is bleeding over this now, I accept your recommendation, declare them 
all dead, even though we knew, I will accept your recommendation to 
write off these hundreds, not 389 but 900 people we left behind in 
Korea. That group just coming up to speed.
  They had one 2-hour hearing in the Senate and my long hearing over 
here in the House. And that is the first time there was a House hearing 
from this chairman in almost half a century for these people whose 
young men, their husbands and sons, started going missing when first 
the North Koreans attacked across the 38th parallel and then when they 
drove us down to the Pusan pocket and we fought back under General 
MacArthur with the brilliant Inchon landing in October 1950 and then 
hit the boarder with China. And then in comes the Chinese, because of 
cabal of perverts in the British system, perverts that all went to 
Cambridge, Burgess, MacLean, Andrew Blount, Philby, a gang of 
homosexual spies gave away our secrets that they learned through the 
British foreign ministry, gave them to the Russians and the Russians 
gave them to the Chinese in Beijing and they told the Koreans, keep 
fighting, the United States will never bomb the allied bridges.

  There is a chain of death and treason for you, and now we leave 
behind hundreds of prisoners, just as they are finding out. This was 
attempted to be repealed and stripped out by one person in the Congress 
of the United States.
  Then we come to number 9, stripped out, 1513(b), permits the civilian 
Defense Department employees who serve with or accompany the Armed 
Forces in the field under orders who become missing as a result of 
hostile action to be covered by this act. It is stripped out, Mr. 
Speaker.
  Let us clarify this. I will read it slowly and then I will flesh it 
out with some anecdotal true historical circumstances.
  Section 1513(b), now public law since February 10, about to be 
stripped out if this conference passes tomorrow and is sent and Clinton 
signs it into law in October. It is in the public law now. All of you, 
all of these Defense Department employees who back up our men all 
around the world, civilian tech reps at Aviano right now, some that are 
accompanying our forces, State Department and/or otherwise AID people, 
Agency for International Development, all around the world, they were 
in Somalia, they are in Haiti, they are in Bosnia, listen to this, if 
you are a wife at home or a husband at home and your wife is overseas 
as a civilian defense employee under orders, accompanying our Armed 
Forces in the field and you become missing as a result of hostile

[[Page H8827]]

action, you are now covered by law since February 10 and you are going 
to be stripped out of law because people did not listen to what we were 
doing and saying.
  They did not listen to all these letters I have here from the 
American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, President Dole's Veterans 
for Dole, the Dole campaign, some Democrat Senators and Congressmen, 
they listened to nobody. They just deferred to one human being and this 
is stripped out.
  Here are those examples. Wake Island. The then War Department and the 
Navy Department, each one had its own separate status, answers to 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no overriding Defense Department or 
Secretary of Defense. They both recruited in the western United States, 
actually all over the country and brought young college kids, maybe 
their studies were getting then down, they said, I will go make some 
good money on a little tiny atoll called Wake Island and Guam and 
Midway, but Wake Island is the one I am thinking of.

  They went out there, hundreds of them, and began to build up the pill 
boxes, the revetments, the buildings to fortify Wake Island. Before 
they hardly got started, Wake Island was attacked by the Japanese on 
December 8.
  Wake Island held out miraculously. I was 8 years old and tracked 
every day of it. They held out until the 23d of December, 2 days before 
Christmas 1941.
  The marine major who served here as a Congressman from Maryland for 
10 years, Devereaux, under his commander, who got short shrift, he 
answered to him but Marines, somehow or other, they earn it most of the 
time, they get the glory. But Sprig, that was the nickname, Cunningham 
was the Naval commander in boss of Wake Island. He could have laughed 
and jumped on the last PBY out. Instead he put some women on it and 
sent one of his lieutenants to tell the story. They held out. One last 
F-4F Wildcat pilot sunk a Japanese destroyer, a light cruiser, amazing 
story, and Sprig Cunningham and his marine commander, Major Devereaux, 
took all these construction workers and said, if it was the old west it 
would have been called deputizing them, we make you a part of the U.S. 
defense force here.
  Here is a pot, the old World War I style helmet my Dad wore a couple 
of decades before. Here is a rifle, Springfield 1903, A-3 bolt action, 
no M-1 at the time, defend this island. And they fought and died 
alongside the military, just like a lot AID people in Vietnam, which I 
am coming to in a minute.

                              {time}  2145

  When the island fell the Japanese had hundreds of these civilian War 
Department or Navy Department workers, hundreds of them. Some died in 
the hospitals, some were shipped off to Japan to die in the mines in 
Manchuria, but most were kept to continue doing what they were hired to 
do, but doing it for the evil war lords of Japan. They started again 
pouring concrete, building, carpentry, all the skills they were hired 
for, and they built up Wake Island into a fortress that it never was 
under us, and we correctly bypassed it, headed for the heartland for 
islands where we could have B-29 bomber distance to the heartland of 
Japan. So we went for Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Rota and then up to Okinawa 
and kept getting closer, and we bypassed Wake. We did hit Guam and 
liberate Guam.
  When we bypassed Wake Island, what happened to all these civilian 
contract workers? With the war only months from ending, with us only 
bombarding Wake a couple of times with ships passing on the way to the 
bigger battles at Leyte and Okinawa, the Japanese lined them all up and 
murdered them, assassinated them, executed them. They worked as slaves 
for the imperial war lords of Japan. The Wake Island commandant was 
executed for this war crime, and they were all executed.
  When I brought that case up, when I brought up a friend of mine named 
Tom Hayden, not the evil Tom Hayden who is a State senator who gave aid 
and comfort, and this time I use that language because nobody is 
protected by Rule 18; Tom Hayden of California gave aid and comfort, 
sustenance, encouragement of morale building strength to the enemy in 
Vietnam, arrived in Hanoi, received champagne and roses at the airport; 
not that Tom Hayden. Not the one who betrayed freedom and serves as a 
State senator in Sacramento against the Constitution of the great State 
of California which does not require a declared war, which federally we 
require to use that term, aid and comfort; but in California it just 
says giving aid and comfort, assistance, sustenance and encouragement 
to an enemy engaged in conflict with American fighting forces. Not that 
Tom Hayden. Another Tom Hayden as handsome as a movie star, carried a 
45, was the youngest AID, Agency for International Development, person 
representing the Mekong Delta, Corps IV in Vietnam, and was under 
combat conditions several times, won a Purple Heart and was given the 
highest civilian decorations for fighting during the Tet offensive when 
Communist forces were coming at people. He is now somebody like the 
good Tom Hayden, and like those people in Wake Island will not be 
covered as they are covered today since February 10 when this provision 
is stripped out.
  So I saved legal counsel, it is almost meaningless without the rest 
of this, I saved judicial review, only on new information, allied 
people, and that is kind of worthless without the rest of this, and 
then I did save the Korean War, Cold War and Indochina War missing 
persons known or suspected of being alive.
  Mr. Speaker, might I inquire, please, how much time I have left?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. McInnis). The gentleman from California 
has about 11 minutes and 35 seconds.
  Mr. DORNAN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  I wish that I had a national radio show where the producers or 
syndication owners would allow me to read for about a week from this 
great book with a plain brown cover, POW, a definitive history of the 
American prisoner of war experience in Vietnam, 1964 to 1973, by John 
G. Hubbell in association with Andrew Jones and Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. I 
just saw him out in the hall recently. I believe he still works for 
Readers Digest.
  Listen to some of our workers, civilian workers in Vietnam and what 
happened to them during the Tet offensive. I called this provision of 
the Missing Service Personnel Act written by Bob Dole and Chairman Ben 
Gilman of this House and by liberal Democrat of honor Frank Lautenberg 
of New Jersey and gutted last night at 2 o'clock in the Senate House 
conference; I called this last amendment to protect civilians under 
orders traveling with our Armed Forces in the field, I called it the 
Mike Benge amendment.
  And here is why. Page 424. This chapter has a Latin title. I remember 
it in my Latin. Jesuit priest taught me. Illegitamae Non Carborundum. 
Do not let the bastards get you down, talking about these vicious 
Communist captures.
  ``After being captured during the Tet offensive, Mike Benge, the 
Agency for International Development agriculture adviser, Betty Ann 
Olsen, a missionary nurse, and Hank Blood, a missionary linguist, had 
walked the jungle trails together for months. At first the three were 
kept chained.
  The first reference in the book to them is their terrible 
circumstance of capture. Now this book is episodic and comes back to 
them.
  At first the three were kept chained together by their North 
Vietnamese army escorts who ate well themselves but kept the prisoners 
on a starvation diet until they were too weak to attempt escape. Then 
the chains were removed. The diet was not improved, though it was 
always a small serving of rice, manioc, and only occasionally a piece 
of fish or meat, terrapin, turtle, iguana or gibbon ape.
  The spring of 1968, they were captured on 1 February, throughout the 
spring of 1968, the party would camp by rivers. Here Benge contracted 
malaria. For most of 35 days he remained delirious or blind. Betty Ann 
Olsen cared for him, keeping him warm when the chills took him, feeding 
him, bathing him. At length the attacks began to subside.
  Betty Ann was seized with a fever, headache, severe pains in the 
joints and muscles.
  You ladies across America, you young women, you women analyzing the 
glory of the Olympics, think about Betty Ann Olsen. For freedom and 
Jesus Christ she finds herself undergoing the tortures of the damned. 
She

[[Page H8828]]

was diagnosed with dengue fever. She rested as much as she was allowed 
to, increased her fluid intake and recovered within a few weeks.
  The party kept moving all summer trending southwesterly toward 
Cambodia. Betty Ann and Hank both developed malaria. Hank, who is 53, a 
decade younger than I as this moment, was 16 years older than Mike, who 
was 37. By the way, Michael Benge survived all of this, and 20 years 
older than Betty Ann who was 33. He seemed to get much sicker than they 
did and have more difficulty recovering.
  And in addition to the malaria, the terrible jungle skin diseases 
tore ugly running sores into him, and these itched maddeningly. Their 
North Vietnamese captors would do nothing for them, and there was 
little the Americans could do for each other except to huddle together 
for warmth against the cold monsoon rains which were now upon the land.
       One morning Blood complained of chest pains. Betty Ann 
     examined him and told Benge the older man had pneumonia. A 
     short walk away was a Communist base camp, complete with 
     hospital facilities. Mike pleaded with the officer in charge 
     of the group that Blood be taken there. His pleas were 
     denied. It took Hank three days to die. He was buried in a 
     shallow, unmarked grave beside a jungle trail. His earthly 
     remains are still there. Mike and Betty Ann were allowed to 
     say prayers over the grave. Then the party moved on.
       They crossed into Cambodia, turned north, then east. By 
     late summer, they were back in the vicinity of Ban Me Thuot, 
     where they had been captured. By now, scurvy had loosened 
     their teeth, and their gums bled constantly. Mike and Betty 
     Ann were covered with running sores; their hair had turned 
     white and came out by the fistful. Betty Ann was anemic and 
     suffering terribly from dysentery. They wondered to what 
     purpose they had traveled and suffered all these months; they 
     seemed to be going nowhere.
       Still, they encouraged each other and tried to keep each 
     other's spirits up. Mike told Betty Ann of his family's ranch 
     in Oregon and of his three-year hitch in the Marine Corps. 
     Betty Ann told Mike of growing up in Africa's Ivory Coast, 
     where her American parents were missionaries. They starved. 
     They chewed at pieces of buffalo hide they found on the 
     mountain trails; and they grabbed bamboo shoots and munched 
     at them.
       Ill and tired himself, Mike worried more and more about 
     Betty Ann. She seemed to be giving out. Their captors showed 
     her no mercy. When she lagged on the trails, they would slap 
     her, knock her down, pick her up, drag her. She kept getting 
     to her feet, moving on.
       The monsoon rains hatched out the worst scourge of the 
     Asian jungle, the bloodsucking leech. By September the jungle 
     foliage was covered with leeches. They were shiny black, and 
     some were enormous. They brushed off by the hundreds onto all 
     who passed. One day Mike found himself following a trail of 
     blood--anemic, dysentery-wracked Betty Ann's. When they made 
     camp that evening, she was too weak to pick off the leeches 
     that covered her. Mike removed them, then tried to carry 
     water from a nearby creek to bathe her. He was not strong 
     enough, though, and could get no help. Again he implored the 
     officer in charge, pointing out that there was a North 
     Vietnamese battalion encamped close by. Surely, it would have 
     a doctor or a medic who could help Betty Ann. Perhaps he 
     would have some medicine, some food for her, something. She 
     was dying. The officer in charge was not interested.
       Betty Ann was five days dying. Like Hank Blood, she was 
     laid in a shallow, unmarked grave near a jungle trail. Mike 
     prayed over her. Then the party moved on.
       Mike developed beriberi. His legs swelled so that he could 
     barely lift them. When he came to a log he had to sit down 
     and lift one leg at a time over it with his hands; and he 
     dared not sit down unless there was a tree close by, so he 
     could pull himself up again. His captors continued to do 
     nothing for him but to keep him moving and to feed him a 
     small ration of rice daily. It occurred to him that they were 
     waiting for him to die. But, suddenly, he knew something they 
     did not know; he was not going to die. Someone had to 
     survive, to make it known what had happened to Hank Blood and 
     Betty Ann Olsen. It was up to him and he would do it, no 
     matter what it took. He would do it by putting one foot ahead 
     of the other, living one hour at a time, for as many steps 
     and years as it took. He was going to do it.
       They walked on, into a village near the Cambodian border. 
     The wretched prisoner was displayed to the locals. ``Look at 
     this American,'' his guards shouted. ``He's been riding in 
     cars and airplanes too long. He can't even walk.''
       Benge, who was fluent in Vietnamese, spoke up in reply: 
     ``It is not true,'' he shouted. ``I have walked halfway 
     across your country. These men have starved me almost to 
     death. I have beriberi and dysentery and malaria, and they 
     have given me no medicine, no care of any kind. And yet I am 
     alive, and I go wherever they take me.''
       The villagers muttered among themselves. The soldiers 
     hustled Mike Benge out of the place. They took him back into 
     Cambodia, which they called the Land of Milk and Honey.
  And the story goes on and on. They take him into a village. Here Mike 
was ushered to a cage-like hut in a stockade area of the base. U.S. 
Army Lieutenant Stephen R. Leopold, captured on May 9 of 1968, 3 months 
after Mike, a green beret officer who occupied a cage of his own, he 
watched Benge approach. He guessed him to be over 60 with his white-
haired beard and the way he used a stick to limp along. Soon the two 
were communicating.
  Benge discovered that Leopold learned new Latin and asked to learn 
the language. Leopold's presence in a Communist cage was ironic. Only 
24, he was not long from the campus of Stanford where in 1965 and 1966 
he had been editor of the Daily, the Stanford newspaper.
  In that capacity he had mounted cogent stands, like I was doing at 
the time on a television show, I, Bob Dornan, against the conduct of 
the war under LBJ and had favored restricting American involvement only 
to military advisers, only to trained South Vietnamese to fight their 
own war, and like so many other editorialists at the time, Bob Dornan 
on television and radio, he had not had his way. I always had what I 
call the Dornan pipeline: air power, sea power, and nobody on the 
ground in Vietnam until they could speak Vietnamese, and that would 
choke it down through the language schools at Monterey and what 
eventually became Rosslyn, and yes, I was not just a willing person to 
sign off on this undeclared war.
  The point I am making here, Mr. Speaker, is that although Hank Blood 
and Betty Ann Olsen were civilian missionaries, Michael Benge, if he 
had died on that trail with them was a worker for the United States 
Government sent into a combat area working in the field with our men 
under orders, and someone said to me:
  ``Who cares about these civilians? They all make $100,000 a month 
while I, flying naval aircraft, was only making 5,000.''

                              {time}  2200

  Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Michael Benge was not making $100,000 a 
month. He was making a GS salary lower than probably an Army major or 
Navy lieutenant commander. No. Just this one civilian aspect is 
treacherous.
  Let me tell the Members about this book. There are passages in here 
of such medieval, unholy, vicious torture, with 20 of our men beaten to 
death by three Cubans, that the fact that someone who had dodged the 
draft three times, the third time actually giving up an induction date 
of July 28, 1969, to have an administration led under those 
circumstances, removing the trade restrictions, normalizing relations, 
removing the combat status, so if we located live Americans we could 
not even pull off a covert raid, although I would hope somebody would 
do something like that, direct action; and now we are driving for the 
Vietnamese to get an ambassador appointed, and then the battle starts 
for most-favored-nation status.
  The people who gave the orders to torture to death our military men, 
like Ron Stewart, Norm Schmidt, Ed Attergerry, J.J. Connell, ``Freddy'' 
Frederick, Ken Cameron, a man called, in the forefront of the book, 
``the faker'', who now we know was Major Earl Cobiel, beaten insensate, 
lashed across his face with a strip of rubber from a tire, and would 
not even blink, and this foul-mouthed Cuban who became a brigadier 
general and was sent to the U.N. named Fernandez, and nobody in my 
country had the guts to arrest him. These people were tortured to 
death: Tom Benson, Roberts, and then it is dedicated to Betty Olsen and 
Hank Blood. I will read again from this book.

                          ____________________