[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17641]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        LOSS OF SOLDIERS' LIVES

  (Ms. SLAUGHTER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise this morning to discuss the issue 
of having lost 1,000 of our soldiers. How heart-breaking this is when 
we look at the ages and the numbers of those young people, many of them 
barely 19 years old, whose dreams for their lives and hopes for their 
future are gone, and our hearts break for them and for their families.
  One statistic that we have not heard much about, and frankly I think 
have not been given the truth about, are the number of those who have 
been wounded and maimed. Again, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old.
  We are told that the casualty statistics of people wounded amounts to 
7,000, but we found out last week in my office, because I was curious 
about that number, that the Pentagon has sent home over 15,800. These 
are young people coming back to the United States whose lives are 
changed forever, many of them amputees. Many of them lost their 
eyesight, many of them again changed and future gone, coming back to an 
America where the Veterans Administration has been so decimated by the 
Bush administration that they will have to wait 6 or 8 months even to 
see a doctor at the VA.
  The resources, the health care that they need, that they counted on 
and that we made a contract with them is not there. What a sad 
commentary on this country, with its wealth and its riches and where 
people go on living their lives, that we would allow our young people 
and a large part of our future to be maimed and to be killed for a war 
with no end.

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