[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Page 6355]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 6355]]

                   VIETNAM: HONORING THOSE WHO SERVED

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, this past Sunday, April 30, was the 
25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. And that reaches deep 
into the soul of every Member of this body, all across America, and all 
across the world.
  Our involvement with Vietnam was filled with discord, it was filled 
with anxiety, and it tore sections and generations of our country 
apart. It began slowly. It gradually escalated and became ``a 
bottomless quagmire'' for America, ``our longest, costliest, and . . . 
least popular war,'' until it finally came to an end.
  Many in our country were very ambivalent about this war. Some thought 
we didn't fight hard enough, some thought we turned our backs on the 
South Vietnamese, and some thought we should have fought a lot harder. 
Many became disillusioned with our Government. I think that experience 
changed the nature of American politics and public life for at least 
some time to come.
  However, there should be no ambivalence whatsoever about those who 
fought that war. Today I want to pay homage to those who fought that 
war. It doesn't matter whether you were for or against the war. All who 
served there deserve our appreciation, our respect, our caring, our 
compassion. It would have been easier to fight in a popular war. There 
are such wars, oddly enough. It is obtuse to say that, but it is true.
  But it took guts, courage, and endurance to fight in that war and 
survive it; to resist the erosion of the bad morale which overtook at 
least part of our ground forces in Vietnam. And then, of course, there 
was the lack of united support from the home front which had to have 
just overwhelming consequences, not only while the soldiers were there, 
but even more so when they returned.
  Those who served did their duty, and they did it under very 
difficult, trying circumstances. Their motto might very well have been 
what Alexander Pope said:

       Act well your part, therein all honor lies.

  Looking back at this war, like the war before it and others, what 
strikes me with enormous poignancy and tenderness, is how young our 
soldiers were. Many were teenagers--18- and 19-year-old men and women--
from familiar and comfortable surroundings, leading lives we all might 
identify with, sent to a completely foreign country, a foreign culture, 
halfway around the world, not knowing what to expect. They encountered 
baking heat, torrential rain, fire ants, leeches, and the enemy. They 
could not imagine the world of horror that awaited them when they got 
there. Presumably they were trained and told about it, but I think it 
was unimaginable to them when they got there. There was no clear enemy 
line. They could be ambushed at any minute. They couldn't tell enemies 
from allies.
  Some never came back. The more than 58,000 names on the Vietnam 
Memorial Wall attest to that. But painful as it is to view those names, 
it does not begin to encompass the scope of pain caused by that war. 
Like a pebble thrown in a pool, each single name on the wall is ringed 
by concentric circles of others touched by that person's death--widows, 
mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends. For all in 
that pool, certain hopes and dreams died as well. We grieve for all of 
them.
  Some came back wounded. In an instant, life could change. Soldiers 
could step on a landmine; they could be killed by friendly fire; they 
could come under random attack. They never knew from moment to moment. 
Due to the wonders of modern medicine, many of those who, in earlier 
wars, would have died, did not and were saved; they survived. But 
merely surviving posed tremendous burdens on those who did. The process 
of adapting, accepting, and moving on is easy to say, very hard to do.
  So I salute the stubborn resilience and perseverance of those who did 
move on with life after recovering from injury.
  Some came back suffering from emotional trauma--people call it PTSD--
and many other things. For them, it has been a very hard road to make 
peace with the past. They are still haunted by it, fighting it in their 
nightmares, in startle reflexes to sudden noises which bring back 
memories of perceived danger. They may turn to alcohol to numb the 
constant pain, to drown the memories.
  Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder deserve our 
most profound compassion, love and caring. As we have discovered, PTSD 
in fact goes back even to World War I. We are discovering a lot of 
things about the consequences of war. We have no way of knowing what 
people have been through, those of us who were not there. But we cannot 
judge their continuing pain. We cannot judge them. But we can honor 
them, and we need to do that, to respect them for what they have done, 
and to hope they will recover as others did.
  As a Senator from West Virginia, I have more than a personal interest 
in this war. Statistics show that West Virginia's soldiers suffered 
more casualties per capita during that war than any other State in the 
Union. On this day, I salute our West Virginia veterans in particular. 
I am enormously proud of the sons and daughters of West Virginia, who, 
as they have done throughout history, volunteered or were drafted, and 
went to fight and to protect their country and their freedom, mountain 
men doing what needed to be done.
  That fighting spirit and strength of character runs incredibly deep 
in this Senator's State, and this Senator is very proud of it.
  Lyndon Johnson called the war ``dirty, brutal and difficult.'' It 
tore apart our country, devastated lives, caused tremendous personal 
hardship and unbearable pain. Twenty years later, the scars are still 
healing.
  I am reminded of the words of Maya Lin, the young architect student 
who designed the Vietnam Memorial. In conceptualizing the form of her 
design, she wrote:

       I thought about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain 
     that lessens with time, but never quite heals over. The idea 
     occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open 
     the earth, and with time, the grass would heal it.

  With time, the wounds of Vietnam will heal. But we should never 
forget the courage and bravery of those who served there. Let us always 
honor our men and women who fought and died in Vietnam.
  (The remarks of Mr. Rockefeller pertaining to the introduction of S. 
2494 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to Senator Grams.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

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