    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [November 11, 1999]
    [Pages 2071-2074]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Veterans Day Ceremony in Arlington, Virginia
    November 11, 1999

        Thank you very much, Secretary West,
    for your eloquent remarks and your leadership and your many years of
    devotion to our country. Commander Smart,
    thank you for your leadership this year. Chaplain Cooke, Lee Thornton, thank you for
    always being here for our veterans.
        The leaders of our veterans' organizations; Members of Congress
    here; Deputy Secretary Gober and members of
    the Cabinet; General Ralston, members of
    the Joint Chiefs; General Davis and other
    Medal of Honor recipients. To the former POW's, the families of those
    still missing in action, to our veterans and their families.
        Let me begin by offering a special word of appreciation to the Army
    Band and Chorus for their magnificent music today and for making us feel
    so important. And I want to say a special welcome today to a person you
    may have read about in the morning papers. Captain Earl Fox is the Senior Medical Officer at the Coast Guard
    Personnel Command here in Washington. He also happens to be the last
    World War II veteran still on active military duty. Now, next week he
    will retire at the tender young age of 80. I think he has earned his
    retirement.

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    But captain, on behalf of a grateful nation, we say thank you for your
    service.
        My fellow Americans, as we all know, we celebrate Veterans Day on
    the anniversary of the armistice ending World War I, on the 11th hour of
    the 11th day of the 11th month. Eighty years ago today, President
    Woodrow Wilson proclaimed this a day of solemn pride in the heroism of
    those who died in the country's service. For 2 full minutes in the
    middle of that day, all traffic and business across our Nation stopped,
    as Americans took time to remember family and friends who fought and
    those who never came home from the ``war to end all wars.'' I don't
    believe those men and women who were our forebears could ever have
    imagined that so many other times in this century young Americans would
    be asked again and again to fight and die for freedom in foreign lands.
        When the 20th century began, the headstones that stand in silent
    formation on these beautiful hills covered fewer than 200 acres. Today,
    at century's end, they cover more than 600 acres. Hundreds of millions
    of people in the United States and around the world sleep in peace
    because more than a million Americans rest in peace, here and in graves
    marked and unmarked all across the world. Today we come again to say we
    owe them a debt we can never repay.
        In a way, the young men and women who have died in defense of our
    country gave up not only the life they were living but also the life
    they would have lived, their chance to be parents, their chance to grow
    old with their grandchildren. Too often when we speak of sacrifice, we
    speak in generalities about the larger sweep of history, and the sum
    total of our Nation's experience. But it is very important to remember
    that every single veteran's life we honor today was just that, a life,
    just like yours and mine. A life with family and friends and love and
    hopes and dreams and ups and downs, a life that should have been able to
    play its full course.
        Fifty-seven years ago this week, the eyes of America were focused on
    a small, sweltering island in the South Pacific. Pearl Harbor had been
    bombed the year before, and Japanese forces in the Pacific were
    capturing one island after another. The task of stopping them fell to a
    group of young marines in an operation called Project Watchtower, in a
    place called Guadalcanal. The battle was expected to last 6 weeks. It
    took 6 months. The jungle was so thick, soldiers could hardly walk;
    fighting so fierce and rations so thin that the average marine lost 25
    pounds. Every night shells fell from the sky, and enemy soldiers charged
    up the hills. The only weapons marines had to defend themselves were
    Springfield rifles left over from World War I. But with the strength
    forged in factories and fields back home, they turned back wave after
    wave of hand-to-hand fighting, until at last, the Navy was able to help
    the marines turn the tide in the naval battle that began 57 years ago
    tomorrow.
        That turned the tide of battle in the whole Pacific and with it the
    tide of American history. On that small island, in the Battle of
    Guadalcanal, Americans proved that our Nation would never again be an
    island, but rather allied with freedom and peace-loving people
    everywhere, as the greatest force for peace and freedom the world has
    ever known.
        In the days and years that have followed, men and women, forged from
    the same mettle, in every branch of our military have built on those
    sacrifices and stood for the cause of freedom, from World War II to
    Korea, to Vietnam, to Kuwait City, to Kosovo.
        On the beach at Guadalcanal is a monument to those who fought on the
    island. In the hills that surround us, some of the 1,500 marines and
    sailors who lost their lives in that battle are laid to rest. They are
    some of the greatest of the greatest generation.
        One of those who served at Guadalcanal was a 19-year-old marine
    lieutenant named John Chafee. He went on to fight in Okinawa, to lead
    troops in Korea, to serve as Governor of Rhode Island and Secretary of
    the Navy, and then, for more than 20 years, as a United States Senator.
    He helped write the law that keeps our air clean. His fights for health
    care helped millions of veterans live better lives. Yet he was so humble
    that when he received a distinguished award from the Marine Corps
    Foundation last year, he hardly spoke about his wartime service. Two
    weeks ago, this remarkable man passed away at the age of 77. At his
    funeral, Hillary and I spent time with his 5 children and his 12
    grandchildren. And I was proud to announce on that day that the Navy
    will be naming one of its most modern and capable destroyers after John
    Chafee.
        Now, that was the measure of one man's life who fought in
    Guadalcanal and survived. Today,

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    in our imaginations, we must try to imagine the measure of all the lives
    that might have been, had they not been laid down in service to our
    Nation. What about the more than one million men and women who have
    given their lives so that we could be free? What would have been the
    measure of their lives? What else would they have accomplished for their
    families and their country, if only they had had the chance?
        Of course, we don't have any of those answers. But because we have
    the question, we clearly have a responsibility to stand in the breach
    for them. We are not just the beneficiaries of their bravery; we are the
    stewards of their sacrifice. Thanks to their valor, today, for the very
    first time in all of human history, more than half of the nations of the
    world live under governments of their own choosing. Our prosperity and
    power are greater than they have ever been. It is, therefore, our solemn
    obligation to preserve the peace and to make the most of this moment for
    our children and the children of the world, so that those who sacrificed
    so much to bring us to this moment will be redeemed in the lives they
    could have lived by the lives that we do live.
        How shall we do this? It means at least that we must continue to be
    the world's leading force for peace and freedom, against terrorism and
    the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It means we must keep
    the commitment I have had since the moment I took the oath of office,
    that our men and women in uniform will remain the best trained, best
    equipped, best prepared in the world.
        In Kosovo, we had zero combat fatalities and only two planes shot
    down, though our pilots took heavy enemy fire every single day and put
    their lives repeatedly at greater risks to avoid hitting civilians on
    the ground. That is a tribute to the professionalism we see every day
    from our military forces all around the world.
        Last month I was proud to sign a bill that will keep us moving in
    that direction, with the start of the first sustained increase in
    military spending in a decade and the biggest pay increase for our
    troops in a generation. It means we must also do more to be faithful to
    our veterans when their service is over. President Theodore Roosevelt
    once said, ``Anyone good enough to shed his blood for his country is
    good enough to be given a square deal afterward.''
        Over the past 7 years we have opened more than 600 veterans' out-
    patient clinics across America. This year we expect to treat 400,000
    more veterans than last year, including more disabled veterans than ever
    before. We will continue to make sure that all veterans receive the care
    they deserve. And we must continue to make a special effort to end
    something that must be intolerable to all of us, the tragedy of homeless
    veterans.
        I want to commend the reigning Miss America, Heather Renee
    French, who is with us today along with
    her family--her father, a disabled Vietnam
    veteran; her mother; her brother; and her sister--
    for all the work she is doing in her position finally to bring proper
    national attention to the plight of homeless veterans. We thank you for
    what you're doing. Thank you. We must not rest until we have done
    everything we possibly can to bring them back into the society they so
    willingly defended.
        And we must bear in mind the special sacrifice of the more than
    140,000 veterans who were held in prison camps or interned during this
    century. I want to commend the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for
    completing a project they launched a year ago today to create a special
    curriculum on the Vietnam war and send a copy to every single high
    school across America. Part of that curriculum focuses on the men and
    women who never came home. We must not forget them.
        I am very proud to announce today that we have successfully
    recovered the remains of three more United States servicemen lost during
    the Korean war. They're coming home tonight. But we must not waver in
    our common efforts to make the fullest possible accounting for all our
    MIA's, for all their families to have their questions answered.
        Finally, fulfilling our responsibility to lead for peace and freedom
    and to be faithful not only to our service personnel but our veterans,
    requires us to do more than prepare people to fight wars and take care
    of them when they come home. We must work with greater determination to
    prevent wars. Every American who gave his or her life for our country
    was, in one way or another, a victim of a peace that faltered, of
    diplomacy that failed, of the absence of adequate preventive strength.
    We know that if diplomacy is not backed by real and credible threats of
    force, it can be empty and even dangerous. But if we don't use diplomacy
    first, then

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    our military will become our only line of defense.
        Of course, it also costs money to help struggling young democracies
    to stand on their feet as friends and partners of the United States, as
    we've tried to do from Poland to Russia to Nigeria to Indonesia. It
    costs money to make sure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union are
    secure, for the terrorists and leaders who wish us harm do not acquire
    the means to kill on a more massive scale. It costs money to support the
    peacemakers in places like the Middle East and the Balkans and Africa,
    so that regional conflicts do not explode and spread.
        But all of you know, better than most, that freedom is not free. And
    all of you know, far better than most, that the costliest peace is far
    cheaper than the cheapest war.
        I am pleased to report to you today that the Democrats and
    Republicans in Congress are working together on a strong compromise that
    will allow us to meet some of our most urgent needs in foreign affairs,
    to prevent war. We're not finished yet, but there is a bipartisan center
    like that which has carried America for 50 years at this hopeful moment
    now at work in the Congress. I am grateful for it, and our children will
    be safer for it.
        In less than 2 months, we'll be able to say the conflict and
    bloodshed that took so many American lives came from another century. So
    we gather today for the last time in this century to dedicate ourselves
    to being good stewards of the sacrifice of the veterans of our country.
        As we look ahead to the large challenges and the grand opportunities
    of the new century and a new millennium, when our country has more
    prosperity than ever before, and for the first time in my lifetime has
    the ability to meet those challenges and to dream dreams and live them
    because we are unthreatened by serious crisis at home and security
    threats abroad, let us resolve to honor those veterans, to redeem their
    sacrifice, to be stewards of the lives they never got to live by doing
    all we can to see that the horrors of the 20th century's wars are not
    visited upon 21st century Americans. That is the true way to honor the
    people we come here today to thank God for.
        Thank you very much, and God bless America.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. in the Amphitheater at Arlington
    National Cemetery. In his remarks, he referred to John W. Smart,
    commander in chief, Veterans of Foreign Wars; Jeni Cooke, Chaplain,
    Department of Veterans Affairs; Lee Thornton, master of ceremonies; Gen.
    Raymond G. Davis, USMC (Ret.), Congressional Medal of Honor recipient;
    and Miss America 2000 Heather Renee French, her father, Ronnie, her
    mother, Diana, her sister, Gretchen, and her brother, Jamison.