[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18547]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   THE VETERANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KIND. Madam Speaker, Abraham Lincoln, during his address at 
Gettysburg, stated that the world will little note, nor long remember 
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. Inspired 
by those words, as well as the words from countless number of veterans 
back in my own congressional district and across the country, I was 
motivated to draft and also introduce today, with my friend and 
colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Houghton), the Veterans 
Oral History Project, which will direct the Library of Congress to 
establish a national archives for the collection and preservation of 
our veterans' oral history through videotape testimony.
  Now that we have the technological means to do so, I think this is a 
worthwhile investment for this country to make. It would be a gift from 
our veterans which will keep on giving not only today but tomorrow, and 
God willing, for generations and centuries to come.
  There is a sense of urgency in introducing this bill which has, I am 
pleased to report, received wide bipartisan support, with a majority of 
the Members in the House of Representatives willing to be original 
sponsors of this legislation. Senator Max Cleland will be introducing 
the bill in the United States Senate this week as well.
  There is a sense of urgency, given the fact that we have roughly 19 
million veterans still living in this country today, of which 3,400 are 
from the First World War, roughly 6 million are still living from the 
Second World War and they are passing away by a rate of roughly 1,500 a 
day.
  If we are to truly honor our veterans, then I think this Nation needs 
to make every conceivable effort to try to preserve their memory.
  I am struck by the number of people who I have encountered who have 
regrets today because they did not take out the family video camera and 
videotape their grandmother or grandparent or father or mother and talk 
to them about their years of serving our country and some of the great 
conflicts that we went through as a Nation during the course of the 
20th century.
  I envision now, with this project, with the cooperation of a lot of 
people across the country, including family members, friends, 
neighbors, the VFW and American Legion halls, school students, class 
projects, who could go out and interview these veterans on videotape, I 
envision that a child in the 21st or 22nd century will be able to call 
up on the Internet the testimony of their great, great, great, 
grandfather or grandmother and in their own words listen to their 
experience during the Second World War or Korea or Vietnam or the Gulf 
War, for instance.
  This is something that we can do with relative ease. The Library of 
Congress is already involved in a similar type of project with the 
American Folk Life Center where they are videotaping community leaders 
around the country as to how they would like their communities to be 
remembered 100 or 200 years from now. They are also engaged on a 
comprehensive project to digitize the information that they are 
collecting; and what this project would call for is for the Library of 
Congress and the talent and expertise that they have there to index the 
videotape and digitize that and make it available to families and to 
anyone who wants access to this very important piece of our Nation's 
history.
  When I have been working on this project, I have had a chance to 
think of many of the veterans who I have encountered back home, people 
like Glenn Averbeck, from my congressional district who served in Korea 
and was part of the occupation force in Japan after the Second World 
War. I think of Don Bruns, a former POW during the Second World War. 
One story Don likes to tell is when he bailed out of a shrapnel-ridden 
B17 over the skies of Germany and he landed in a patch of kohlrabi. To 
this day, he cannot stand the sight or smell of that vegetable; but 
there is more to Don's story as he tells of the days of hunger in the 
stalag, days of boredom, days of anxiety and days when his captured 
comrades drifted towards insanity waiting for the day when they would 
be liberated or the day when they would escape.
  These are the stories that we need to capture, in Don's words, and 
preserve for history's sake.
  When I talk about the Veterans Oral History Project, I think of 
William Ehernman, a World War II vet shot down in the Pacific. William 
tells of flying cover for PT boats in the Pacific, including flying 
cover for one young commander, a Naval officer by the name of John F. 
Kennedy. I also think of Golden Barritt, a World War I veteran from my 
district who died just last summer. It is a shame that we did not get 
Golden's oral history from the Great War. He almost reached his 100 
birthday, and just last year he received a medal from the government of 
France for his participation in the First World War.
  I also think of my father, who I did get a chance to videotape who 
served in the Army; my uncle who served during the Second World War; 
and also my younger brother who recently served during the Gulf War.
  So I am encouraged by the bipartisan support that many of my 
colleagues have given for this legislation, and I would encourage this 
House to move the legislation quickly since time is of the essence.

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