[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 176 (Tuesday, December 9, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16126-S16127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. Daschle (for Mr. Kerry (for himself and Mr. Kennedy)):
  S. 1991. A bill to require the reimbursement of members of the Armed 
Forces or their family members for the costs of protective body armor 
purchased by or on behalf of members of the Armed Forces; to the 
Committee on Armed Services.
  (At the request of Mr. Daschle, the following statement was ordered 
to be printed in the Record).
 Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, it is the responsibility of the 
military departments to ``organize, train, and equip,'' the armed 
forces of the United States. Yet, reports indicate that nearly a 
quarter of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq still wait for the latest 
``Interceptor'' body armor, which is a Kevlar vest with ``small-arms 
protective inserts''--boron carbide ceramic plates--that protect 
critical organs from weapons fired by assault rifles like the Ak-47s 
favored by Iraqi insurgents.
  While the Congress has taken measures to provide the latest personal 
protective gear to all U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, over the 
last several months we have heard alarming reports of family members 
scurrying to buy bullet-proof vests to send to their loved ones in 
Iraq. Military families are patriotic and selfless. Their devotion is 
no less than that of those serving in harm's way. They have more than 
enough to worry about, let alone whether or not they can find and buy 
the gear that might save their child's life. This is the responsibility 
of the Department of Defense, plain and simple. There is no excuse for 
their failure.
  On November 19, 2003, acting-Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee 
admitted to Congress that the administration failed to provide basic 
equipment, like body armor, to all of our forces in Iraq because, as he 
put it, ``Events since the end of major combat operations in Iraq have 
differed from our expectations and have combined to cause problems.'' 
The Washington Post reported recently that, ``Going into the war in 
Iraq, the Army decided to outfit only dismounted combat soldiers with 
the plated vests, which cost about $1,500 each. But when Iraqi 
insurgents began ambushing convoys and killing clerks as well as combat 
troops, controversy erupted.'' I ask unanimous consent that the full 
text of this article be included in the Record.
  Stories abound of family members, fathers and mothers, wives, and 
others paying for personal body armor out of their own pockets and 
shipping the much needed equipment to Iraq. Consider the case of Mimi 
McCreary of Victorville, CA, whose son Olaf received his bullet-proof 
vest not from his reserve unit, but from his colleagues on the Clinton, 
SC, police department. Or consider the 120 members of the National 
Guard from Marin County, CA, who were unsure of when their body armor 
would be made available. Instead of letting their neighbors go off to 
war, the men and women of law enforcement in Marin County donated more 
than 60 vests so that they would have ``at least some protection.'' Or 
consider Army Specialist Richard Murphy of Sciota, PA, whose parents, 
Susan and Joe Werfelman, purchased the ceramic plates missing from 
their son's vest. According to Murphy's step-father, he ``called us 
frantically three or four times on this . . . We said, ``If the Army is 
not going to protect him, we've got to do it.''
  We owe Mr. and Mrs. Werfelman and Mrs. McCreary and every other 
military family an incredible debt of gratitude. They raised children 
who believe in this country and are risking all in service to it. The 
last thing we should ask of them now is to take money out of their own 
pockets to buy the gear their kids should have had in the first place. 
But that's exactly what poor planning has led to.

  The legislation I introduce today with Senator Kennedy requires the 
Department of Defense to reimburse family members who paid money out of 
their own pockets to provide the personal body armor that the 
government failed to provide our troops. Lives and blood will always be 
the cost of war. But it is a dereliction of duty to send anyone into 
harm's way without basic protective gear, and it is disgusting for 
family members to have to take this burden of outfitting their loved 
ones for war. This grateful Nation must make right by those family 
members and reimburse their expenses in providing these materials to 
their sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Let families send 
pictures and letters from home. The Department of Defense should 
provide the gear.
  There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Dec. 4, 2003]

                     Body Armor Saves Lives in Iraq

                   (By Vernon Loeb and Theola Labbe)

       Baghdad.--Pfc. Gregory Stovall felt the explosion on his 
     face. He was standing in the turret of a Humvee, manning a 
     machine gun, when the roadside bomb went off. At the time, he 
     was guarding a convoy of trucks making a mail run. In an 
     instant, Stovall's face was perforated by shrapnel, the index 
     finger on his right hand was gone, and the middle finger was 
     hanging by a tendon. But the 22-year-old from Brooklyn 
     remembers instinctively reaching for his chest and stomach--
     ``to make sure everything was there,'' he said. It was, 
     encased in a Kevlar vest reinforced by boron carbide ceramic 
     plates that are so hard they can stop AK-47 rounds traveling 
     2,750 feet per second. Thus, on the morning of Nov. 4, 
     Stovall became the latest in a long line of soldiers serving 
     in Iraq to be saved by the U.S. military's new Interceptor 
     body armor.
       This high-tech ``system''--the Kevlar vest and ``small-arms 
     protective inserts,'' which the troops call SAPI plates--is 
     dramatically reducing the kind of torso injuries that have 
     killed soldiers on the battlefield in wars past.
       Soldiers will not patrol without the armor--if they can get 
     it. But as of now, there is not enough to go around. Going 
     into the war in Iraq, the Army decided to outfit only 
     dismounted combat soldiers with the plated vests, which cost 
     about $1,500 each. But when Iraqi insurgents began ambushing 
     convoys and killing clerks as well as combat troops, 
     controversy erupted.
       Last month, Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) and 102 other 
     House members wrote to Rep. Duncan Hunger ( R-Calif.), 
     chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to demand 
     hearings on why the Pentagon had been unable to provide all 
     U.S. service members in Iraq with the latest body armor. In 
     the letter, the lawmakers cited reports that soldiers' 
     parents had been purchasing body armor with ceramic plates 
     and sending it to their children in Iraq.
       The demand came after Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. 
     Central Command and commander of all military forces in Iraq, 
     told a House Appropriations subcommittee in September that he 
     could not ``answer for the record why we started this war 
     with protective vests that were in short supply.''
       With the armor, ``it's the difference between being hit 
     with a fist or with a knife,'' said Ben Gonzalez, chief of 
     the emergency room at the 28th Combat Support Hospital in 
     Baghdad, the largest U.S. Army hospital in the country, which 
     treats the majority of wounded soldiers.
       Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington 
     University, began investigating the Army's decision not to 
     equip all troops deploying to Iraq with Interceptor body 
     armor after learning that one of his students, reservist 
     Richard Murphy, was in the

[[Page S16127]]

     country with a Vietnam-era flak jacket. ``There's been an 
     overwhelming effort to get the military every possible 
     resource,'' Turley said. ``To have such an item denied to 
     troops in Iraq was a terrible oversight.'' Since he began 
     publicizing the lack of body armor, Turley said, he has been 
     deluged with e-mails from people offering to donate body 
     armor to U.S. troops.
       Joe Werfelman, the father of Turley's student, said he was 
     dismayed to learn that his son had been sent to Iraq in May 
     without ceramic plates. ``He called us frantically three or 
     four times on this,'' Werfelman said in an interview. ``We 
     said, `If the Army is not going to protect him, we've got to 
     do it.' '' So Werfelman, of Scotia, Pa., found a New Jersey 
     company that had the ceramic plates in stock, plunked down 
     $660 for two plates and a carrying case, and sent them to his 
     son. ``As far as I know, he's still using the ones that we 
     got him'' he said. ``Some units have the new plates and some 
     units don't.''
       At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 
     19, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the committee's chairman, 
     told Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee that the shortage of 
     body armor in Iraq was ``totally unacceptable.'' ``Now, where 
     was the error--and I say it's an error made in planning--to 
     send those troops to forward-deployed regions, and the 
     conflict in Iraq, without adequate numbers of body armor?'' 
     Warner asked. ``Events since the end of major combat 
     operations in Iraq have differed from our expectations and 
     have combined to cause problems,'' Brownlee said. Before 
     approving the administration's $87 billion supplemental bill 
     for Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress added hundreds of millions 
     of dollars for more body armor, armored Humvees, and other 
     systems to protect soldiers from roadside bombs and ambushes.
       Now, three manufacturers are working overtime to produce 
     the 80,000 vests and 160,000 plates required to outfit 
     everyone in Iraq by the end of the year. Assembly lines are 
     producing 25,000 sets a month.
       Commanders say the vests are changing the way soldiers 
     think and act in combat. ``I will tell you that the 
     soldiers--to include this one--experience some degree of 
     feeling a little indestructible, particularly in light of the 
     fact that we have seen the equipment work,'' said Lt Col. 
     Henry Arnold, a battalion commander and combat veteran in 
     the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq. ``It's a 
     security blanket,'' Stovall said from his hospital bed, 
     awaiting a medevac flight to Germany with his hand 
     bandaged. ``If only they had a glove, I might have my 
     finger, but I'm thankful that I'm here.''
       The product of a five-year military research effort aimed 
     at reducing the weight and cost of the plates while 
     increasing their strength, the body armor made its combat 
     debut last year in Afghanistan and was credited with saving 
     more than a dozen lives during Operation Anaconda. The 
     camouflage Kevlar vest, which alone can stop rounds from a 
     9mm handgun, weighs 8.4 pounds, while each of the plates 
     weighs 4 pounds. At 16.4 pounds, Interceptor body armor is a 
     third lighter than the 25-pound flak jacket from the Vietnam 
     era, but it provides far more protection.
       Consider the case of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 505th 
     Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. 
     During a foot patrol in Fallujah in late September, an Iraqi 
     insurgent suddenly emerged from an alleyway and fired an AK-
     47 at Spec. John Fox from point-blank range. Fox was hit in 
     the stomach as he returned fire, and the blast knocked him 
     off his feet. The bullet hit the middle of three ammunition 
     magazines hanging from the front of his Kevlar vet, igniting 
     tracer rounds and setting off a smoke grenade. A thick gray 
     plume poured from his vest where he lay. His squad mates, 
     having shot and killed the gunman, rushed to his side. ``Am I 
     bleeding? Am I bleeding?'' they recalled Fox asking. They 
     checked and discovered he was unharmed. His body armor had 
     protected him not only from the AK-47 round by also from his 
     own exploding munitions. ``Fox must have been only 10, 15 
     meters from this guy,'' recalled St. Roger Vasquez. ``And 
     this thing stopped the bullet.''
       A month later, two of those who had rushed to Fox's side, 
     Spec. Sean Bargmann and Spec. Joseph Rodriguez, were on a 
     mounted patrol in Fallujah, sitting atop a Humvee, when a 
     powerful roadside bomb exploded just feet away. ``It felt 
     like somebody took a Louisville Slugger to my head,'' 
     Bargmann said. Weeks after the attack, he and Rodriguez still 
     bore the outlines of their armor: The tops of their head, 
     protected by their Kevlar helmets, and their torsos, 
     protected by their body armor, were unscathed. But Bargmann 
     had a deep cut right below the helmet line, and Rodriguez had 
     three scars running down his right cheek and a scar above his 
     left eye.
       This often happens with body armor: Lives are saved, but 
     faces, arms and legs are punctured and scarred. Doctors are 
     treating serious wound to the extremities that are creating 
     large numbers of amputees--soldiers who in earlier wars never 
     would have made it off the battlefield. Gonzalez, the doctor 
     at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, is not complaining about 
     the number of amputations. ``The survival rate has increased 
     significantly,'' he said. ``In the past, you'd see head and 
     chest and abdominal injuries. They would die even before they 
     got to me.''
       Sgt. Gary Frisbee of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment 
     remembers standing in the turret of a Humvee waiting to die. 
     His vehicle was bringing up the rear during a routine three-
     vehicle patrol in Sadr City, Baghdad's vast Shiite slum, when 
     hundreds of armed followers of the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr 
     opened fire on them with AK-47s and rocket-propelled 
     grenades. ``I knew it was all over; it was just a matter of 
     when,'' he recalled. ``You're bracing yourself, because 
     you're just waiting for the bullet to hit you. The volume of 
     AK fire was unreal, from the roofs, in front of your, and 
     behind you.'' Two of 10 soldiers on the patrol were killed; 
     four were wounded. During the battle, Frisbee felt something 
     hit the back of his Kelvar vest but kept on fighting. When 
     the smoke finally cleared, he pulled out the back plate to 
     see what had happened and found a bullet hole. It has been, 
     as he had thought, just a matter of time. He had been hit--
     and saved by boron carbide.
                                 ______