[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 20]
[House]
[Pages 29626-29628]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   HONORING VETERANS ON VETERANS' DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we were told that we would 
have votes on Friday, which is tomorrow; and for those of us that live 
in California, this is 21 hours back and forth to California and then 
to return the following day. So I decided to stay here and send 
messages to my veterans organizations and also to do a special order. 
Since that time, we found out that there will not be votes tomorrow, 
that they will not happen until Tuesday.
  The men and the women behind me and before me, Mr. Speaker, have come 
today to pay homage to our veterans. I apologize for keeping them here 
on Veterans' Day, but I will be brief.
  Today is very difficult for many of us, both Memorial Day and 
Veterans' Day, that, as a retired Navy person, I was shot down on my 
300th mission over North Vietnam. I understand and appreciate what this 
day means to veterans and what it means for their families, for the 
active duty, the Reserve, and the Guard, and for our prisoners of war, 
wherever they may be.
  This is our last meeting for Veterans' Day of this century, for we 
enter the 21st century in this next year.
  Like the human search for freedom this century, our peace has come at 
a very high price throughout this century. For those of us that have 
seen combat and its horrors resist as a last means engaging into 
another war.
  Many have fought for different reasons in different conflicts, but I 
can think of no other reason other than freedom that should rise to the 
top of reasons for conflict.
  I would like to think, as we enter this next century, that the world 
would be free, not only free for individuals, but free of conflict. 
But, unfortunately, it is still a very serious and dangerous place.
  I feel, serving on the Defense Committee on Appropriations, that it 
is even more dangerous than it was 25 years or even 50 years ago.
  I would like to go through a couple of stories I think in honor of 
some veterans. I heard this first story from Ronald Reagan as he 
accepted his inauguration on the Capitol steps a few years back.
  I would ask my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, if they have ever heard of a 
private named Martin Trepto, a very famous individual. I would say that 
no one listening to this speech or, yourself, Mr. Speaker would know 
who he is. But let me tell my colleagues his story.
  Martin Trepto was a baker that made bread and rolls in France. And 
during World War I, he closed his shop and he volunteered to go to war 
because he thought it was his duty.
  As Martin Trepto entered the battlefield, he was assigned a position 
as a messenger. They did not have the fancy electronics that they have 
today, and many of those messages were carried in a courier's pouch. 
When Martin Trepto got to the battlefield, the three messengers ahead 
of him had been killed trying to deliver a message.
  Martin Trepto volunteered to take that message forward to the front 
lines. And like the other three messengers, Martin Trepto was killed.
  They found his diary, and in his diary it read: ``This has been a 
very difficult war. I do not know if I will survive it. But I must 
treat every action of mine as if that individual action would shorten 
this war and cause freedom for my friends.''
  How profound is that. How many of us, Mr. Speaker, honor those 
veterans

[[Page 29627]]

that gave their lives in some cases, that served this country so that 
if every one of their actions would give us the right to stand here?
  The day that I was shot down over Vietnam, the executive officer of 
the F-92, Commander Blackburn, was also shot down. He did not come 
back. His backseater, Steve Hoodloff, came back with the rest of the 
POWs in 1994.
  Commander Blackburn's son lived in Poway, California, in my 
congressional district. And from time to time his son would call and 
say, ``Duke, can I come over and talk about my father?'' It was the 
same questions and mostly the same answers.
  Well, a few years later, about 8 years, they brought Commander 
Blackburn's remains back. Now, it is not like his son wanted to see his 
father come back. But it was like a 5,000-pound weight had been lifted 
off that child's back, knowing the reserve and the resolve of what 
happened to his father.
  That is why, Mr. Speaker, that if there is any hope of any POW or MIA 
coming back, that we must turn over every stone and do everything that 
we can possible.
  Recently I visited North Vietnam. It was very difficult. Pete 
Peterson, who is a Democrat, now the ambassador to Vietnam, asked me to 
come and raise the American flag over Ho Chi Minh City for the first 
time. That was also very difficult to do.
  But I want to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that the men and the women of 
our active duty military and some of our veterans are doing everything 
that they can, at least in Vietnam, to make sure that our loved ones 
know the resolve of their family members that did not come back from 
that war.
  Let me tell you about another individual. On 19 January, 1972, I was 
fortunate enough to survive and shoot down a MiG-21 over North Vietnam, 
one of five that I shot down. When I got back aboard the U.S.S. 
Constellation, all 5,000 guys, Mr. Speaker, were up on the flight deck. 
We were trying to get the wings folded, my backseater Willie Driscoll 
and I, get the arm switches safe. I looked over at the side of the 
aircraft, and there were the 5,000 guys with Captain James D. Ward, who 
was skipper of the U.S.S. Connie.
  Admiral Hutch Cooper was Commander of Task Force 77. And there was my 
plane captain, Willie Lincoln White, with a big smile on his face. He 
broke through the crowd, Mr. Speaker. He knocked over Admiral Cooper. 
And you do not do that in the Navy. As he broke through the crowd, he 
ran back under the tail feathers of the airplane and jumped up on the 
port wing, and he came down the turtle back as I am trying to get the 
ejection seat pinned into the airplane, and he grabbed me by the arm 
and he said, ``Lieutenant Cunningham, Lieutenant Cunningham, we got our 
MiG today, didn't we?''
  What was Willie White telling me, Mr. Speaker? That he was a very 
important member of a team, that he was a United States serviceman, 
that I only deserved about one-five-thousandth of the credit.
  From Ramirez, the Filipino cook that used to fix our double egg, 
double cheese, double fry burger every night, to the guys that put the 
hydraulic pumps in the airplane to the fuel, if you can imagine an 
ordnance man forgetting to put an umbilical cord on a missile or a gun 
so that it did not work, they all deserve credit. That is who we honor 
today, those veterans who served this country.
  I saw plane captains cry when their pilots did not come back. That is 
how intense and how dedicated they were.
  Let me talk of another hero, a veteran, he has asked me not to tell 
his name, and he is alive today, if I can get through this.
  I have a good friend that was a prisoner in Vietnam, and it took him 
almost 5 years to knit an American flag on the inside of his shirt as a 
prisoner of war in Hanoi. And on occasion he would take off his shirt 
whenever they got together with one or two prisoners, and they would 
hang the shirt with the flag above them to symbolize freedom. And that 
was fine, until the Vietnamese guards broke in one day; and, Mr. 
Speaker, they ripped his shirt to shreds. They took out this prisoner, 
and they brutally beat him all day long.
  When they brought him back, he was unconscious. He had broken bones 
so bad that his fellow prisoners did not think he would survive. And so 
they took him and put him on a bale of straw and comforted him as much 
as they could and went back and huddled in a corner.
  A few minutes later, they heard a stirring from the POW. He had 
dragged himself to the center of the floor and started gathering those 
bits of thread to knit another American flag.
  That is what Veterans' Day is. It stands for freedom. It stands for 
the Constitution of this great country.

                              {time}  1415

  I would look at the conflicts that we have had over the last 5 years, 
and I think foreign policy with military policy in many cases has been 
wrong in my opinion. Our military today is at the lowest that I have 
ever seen it in 30 years of military service. We are keeping only about 
23 percent of our military, our enlisted, in. We are retaining only 
about 30 percent of our pilots.
  Many will say, well, it is just the economy, because they are going 
out for the jobs and away from the military. That is partially true. 
But the primary reason is when I talk to these young men and women that 
are serving on active duty, Mr. Speaker, they are away from their 
families, from their wives and from their children, in some cases 
husband and children for 8 months out of the year and in some cases 
this has been 4 years in a row. This is during peacetime. That is hard 
for anybody to be away from their family at 8 months at a time each 
year.
  In Somalia, we lost 22 Rangers, Mr. Speaker, because the White House 
refused to give them armor. It took us 17 hours to get into Mogadishu. 
By the time we got there we had lost 22 Rangers. This was the third 
time that our military leaders had asked for armor. Yet, in Somalia, 
the warlords are still there. General Aideed has died but his son is 
still there. And it cost us billions of dollars. In Haiti, we are still 
spending $20 million a year in Haiti. The warlords are still there. 
Aristide is still there. And that cost us billions of dollars.
  Iraq, we went in four times over the last 2 years. Each time that Mr. 
Ritter and them were rejected from inspection, we went to war. It has 
cost us billions of dollars. And today we are spending a billion 
dollars, not a million dollars, Mr. Speaker, but a billion dollars a 
year still in Iraq. Bosnia has cost this country $16 billion. That does 
not account for next year, or the following years.
  We bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan. The White House just settled 
for $50 million because of a mistake. In Kosovo, the total number of 
people killed in Kosovo before us, the United States and NATO, going 
into Kosovo was 1,012. One-third of those were Serbs that were killed 
by the KLA. We destroyed an infrastructure of an entire country. We 
lost thousands of people. Thousands of people were thrust out of their 
homes. And today look at the results. Ninety percent of the Serbs have 
been ethnically cleansed out of Kosovo by the KLA. One hundred eighty 
orthodox Catholic churches have been destroyed by the KLA. And we are 
building two $350 million bases in Kosovo, the United States. Are we 
going to be there like we are in South Korea, or other places in the 
world?
  And whether you agree with Kosovo or not, we flew 86 percent of all 
the missions in Kosovo, the United States, 86 percent. Ninety percent 
of all the weapons dropped were from the United States. And if we are 
to ask our active duty, our reserve and our guard to fly in these 
conflicts and other nations not pay their fair share, then at least 
NATO needs to upgrade its equipment so that they can use the standoff 
weapons, or they need to pay for it, because before this Congress 
today, the great debate on are we spending Social Security and Medicare 
money or not, $150 billion in these conflicts. In my opinion, there are 
very few that the United States should have entered in.
  I think, Mr. Speaker, it is time, as J.C. Watts said in the 
Republican Convention in San Diego, we ask God to

[[Page 29628]]

come back into our country. I think it is time to secure peace through 
strength. I would ask, Mr. President, not through weakness, not through 
BRACs, not through decreasing our defense budget but increasing it.
  Recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every one of our 
four-star generals said we need $150 billion to bring us up to where we 
can fight just two wars. I do not want our men and women going to war 
and having to celebrate or recognize them during Memorial Day because 
we did not give them the assets. It is time to honor our veterans, our 
active duty, our reserves, and give them the resources that we 
promised, and to our veterans as well, Mr. Speaker, because as we honor 
our veterans today, many of the fellows that I served with, the men and 
women, are telling their children not to enter active duty service 
because their benefits have been eroded.
  Well, this Congress in a very bipartisan way, with the veterans bill 
and with the defense bill, came to that call. We provided $1.7 billion 
increase for veterans' medical health care, the largest increase since 
the 1980s. The total funding is $19 billion for our veterans. It 
provides a $5 million increase for veterans' medical and prosthetic 
research. It provides $51 million for the veterans benefit 
administration to expedite claims processing. Many of my veterans and 
the veterans of every Member in this body, Mr. Speaker, have got 
veterans saying that those claims take too long. We more than doubled 
the President's request for veterans' State extended care. My veterans 
in San Diego County wrote a bill called subvention. It enables our 
veterans to use Medicare at military hospitals. It actually saves 
money. But yet we are still limited to a pilot project. Our veterans 
are saying they are tired of Band-Aids for their promised health care. 
We need to pass, Mr. Speaker, the FEHBP for veterans. If you have an 
active duty military and you have a civilian that sits next to them, 
when they retire, the civilian gets FEHBP, which is a supplemental to 
Medicare. The military does not. That is wrong. We could help our 
veterans by passing that as a full substitute and to help them do that 
as well.
  Mr. Speaker, let me close with what I think this day represents. On 
the 10th of May, 1972, I was shot down over Vietnam. In coming down in 
a parachute, I thought I was going to be a prisoner of war, or even 
killed, since the enemy was down below. Air Force, Marine and Navy 
pilots risked their lives to get my back-seater and I out. In coming 
down in that parachute, they told us there were two things that would 
keep you alive. One was having a good family back home, and the other 
was faith in God. I would tell my veterans, there is going to be a time 
in each and every one of your lives, maybe you lose a loved one, maybe 
you lose your job, but if you get on your knees and you say a little 
prayer, I guarantee somebody is going to listen to you. It is time, Mr. 
Speaker, to invite God back into this country. I think as we look 
forward into the 21st century, how exciting it is, not just 
communications but health care research and the things that we can do 
to take care of our veterans.
  I would close, Mr. Speaker, by saying God bless the veterans, God 
bless the active, the Guard and the Reserves, and to our MIAs and our 
families, do not give up hope. God bless America.

                          ____________________