| ... he's one of our caucus' foremost experts on the issues important to military families and that are important to us as we try to wrestle with this very difficult issue of how we are going to extricate ourselves from this war in iraq. our caucus has tremendous respect for your service. it's my pleasure to yield to congressman sestak. mr. sestak: i may be the ones slowing us down tonight because i'm 50-something in this 30-something group. if i might speak, really honored to be asked to say a few words on the last day of the month of military child. in the pentagon across the secretary defense's office is the best painting in all the pentagon. it's of a young service member neiling in church. next to him -- kneeling in church. next to him is his spouse. and under him is from the book of isiah. and god says, whom shall i send? who will go for us? and he replies, here am i. send me. really what that picture depicts is a family that actually is saying, here we are, send us. i got to know almost joining up in 1970 and on a lot of those families. we don't have in the military a human resource department. we outsource problems or challenges. so you sit there with them when they are in debt and help to balance a checkbook. or you sit there with them trying to make sure they get the proper care in the hospital. you get to know the families very well. you get to know them in another way during long deployments. back then in those early 1970' days you would sit there as a young man came up after leaving port and receiving letter or getting a letter from another ship from his wife that says, johnny's ok after the operation. but he didn't know about the operation. and maybe the next port of call 30 days later the letter would come in that said, want you to know johnny had a broken leg. it's ok. he'll have an operation next week. or go ahead through some 3 1/2 decades or so and how coy sit there and with technology record over the internet read each evening to my daughter who was during this -- gone from her for about a year, during the war, and would be able to read to her a book so that she would go up to the tv and just kiss it, even today seven years later she goes up to the tv if i'm on and kisses it. i bring those up because i think what people in the military learn is that when authority or responsibility passes and you come home, what's really left is the infinite tenderness and caring of a loving family. yet we also recognize in the military in words that were more reflective of its time three, 3 1/2 decades ago that on the commissary bag, shopping bags of each of the military or navy complexes would be a saying, navy wife, toughest job in the navy. or 70 years ago the wife of a chief naval operations said in a poem, a navy wife remembers, when crying seems likely, just laugh it away. i bring those up because what sets our military apart from other professions is someone once said it has the dignity of danger. the character that our men and women who serve in the military show and triumph with doesn't begin in theories. it really begins in those places from whence we come and the people who made us whom we are. not just our communities but in particular our families. i bring that up because today was what brought out here is every war is different. in world war ii our veterans on average had about 182 days of combat. horrific combat. battles like normandy or guadalcanal. but there was some dwell time in between those battles. time for your physical nerves to adjust which has a major impact upon your mental state and time for your mental state to readjust. in iraq, however, our soldiers go outside the wire every day for 15 months into a combatlike situation. and then they come home for 12 and go back again. then come back to families where 19% of them face posttraumatic stress disorder, 33% have a mental challenge from depression to anxiety. so as our families say here we are, send us, it's now never been more vital than now to recognize that if this nation still wants its families to say here we are, send us, we more than ever before i believe owe it to our veterans to take care of them and their families in the ways that have been laid out much better than i could have by my colleagues. thank you for speaking tonight. it's a wonderful botherhood and sisterhood i lived in for many years that find the grandest except kur of all a home in the hearts of brave men and women . when all that passes out there, what's left is that family. whatever we can do for them from now and forever is the most arduous responsibility i believe congress in this time of war can be charged with. thank you. ms. wasserman schultz: thank you so much, mr. sestak, and for your 31 years of military ... |