[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 157 (Tuesday, October 27, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2641]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   COMMEMMORATING THE LIFE OF U.S. ARMY RESERVE CAPTAIN BENJAMIN A. 
                                SKLAVER

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ROSA L. DeLAURO

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 27, 2009

  Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Speaker, I rise to commemorate the life and mourn 
together with his family the death of an American hero, CPT Benjamin A. 
Sklaver of Hamden, Connecticut.
  A captain the 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division 
serving his second tour of duty, Benjamin Sklaver was killed in an 
ambush on Friday, October 2, while on patrol in Afghanistan. Struck 
down at the age of 32, he leaves behind a legacy of humanitarian works 
and honorable deeds that would do any man or woman proud.
  Captain Sklaver was, as his friend Jake Herrle deemed him, ``a 
combatant of peace,'' and his career of good works took him from Malawi 
to Djibouti and from Uganda to Central Asia. He served as a crisis 
relief specialist, helping people all around the world get back on 
their feet after hard times. Compelled to national service by his 
patriotism and to humanitarian action by his Jewish faith, Sklaver was 
at once a proud soldier and a humble man of peace. Along with his 
firearm and ammunition, he carried schoolbooks and drinking water. He 
constructed not only forts and bunkers, but roads, schools, and 
dormitories. He brought not war and destruction in his wake, but 
infrastructure and peace.
  Before serving in Afghanistan as an army reservist, Sklaver--a 
graduate of Tufts University as well as its Fletcher School of Law and 
Diplomacy--had worked for FEMA in New York and the CDC as an 
international emergency and refugee health analyst. And he was the co-
founder of and director of ClearWater Initiative, an organization which 
aspired to provide clean drinking water to refugees displaced by an 
international emergency.
  In the past two years, Sklaver's leadership at ClearWater had managed 
to provide over 6,500 people in Uganda with clean drinking wells. To 
the thousands of lives he changed in Uganda, Sklaver was known as 
``Moses Ben.'' But to his grieving family--his parents, Gary and Laura; 
his siblings, Anna and Samuel; his fiancee, Beth; her son, Danny; and 
her parents, Barbara and Jimmy Segaloff--he was simply Ben, a warm, 
kind, and generous young man with so much life ahead of him, taken from 
us all too early.
  Connecticut mourns, and America mourns, this family's loss.

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