thedrifter
04-24-06, 07:16 AM
Restoration Weekend: A Salute to the Troops
By FrontPage Magazine
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 24, 2006
This dinner and salute to our troops took place on Saturday, February 25, 2006, at the Restoration Weekend at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. -- The Editors.
John O’Neill: Before we begin the actual program, I’d like to recognize certain wonderful people who will come up over the course of the night. But I’d like to recognize one person who not on the program: Gunnery Sergeant Larry Carlson. He led a platoon in Fallujah. He’s home now safely, and he’s here. If he could stand up, I’d like to recognize him.
I’d like to say a brief word about a special project called the Soldiers’ Memorial Project set up to produce a statue to honor Scott Vallely and many other soldiers killed in the War on Terror.
The topic of tonight’s dinner is courage. There are many different kinds of courage. David mentioned my wife, Anne O’Neill. Another person of courage I think about is my old boss and friend, Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He hoped someday to come back here and retire in Phoenix but instead found himself very ill. He arose from his sick bed to swear in and provide to the oath to the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
Tonight, though, we are honoring with the courage without which this country would be absolutely nothing. That is the courage of our soldiers and sailors. Tonight, for the fifth time in my life, many of our military men and women are at war far from home, not really knowing if they’re going to make it through the night. Or to the next day. They’re unlikely heroes. They’re mostly just kids, ages 18-23, drawn from all over our country. But upon the thread of their courage hangs the fate of freedom throughout the world, our whole republic, and indeed much for the hope of the world. Amazingly, even in terrible times like the Battle of the Bulge, or the Chosin Reservoir, or Way City, or Caisson, those kids have never let us down.
In honoring them, we honor also our greatest heroes, the kids who never came home from those foreign lands, as well as the ideals of our republic itself.
Peter recently invested his time and effort to produce the book Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty to honor all living recipients of the Medal of Honor. He did this as a labor of love. As a result, Peter probably knows more Medal of Honor recipients than anyone that you can imagine, and we all owe a debt to his work, which I understood took almost two years.
I’d like to present Peter Collier who has rendered a tremendous service for the United States.
Peter Collier: I feel kind of like George C. Scott up here. We’re going to talk about medals tonight, medals and bravery and extraordinary acts that our servicemen and women give us freely and generously in the military equivalent of grace.
As we do that, as John said earlier, we need to remember that some young Army private is out there freezing in the mountains of Afghanistan tonight, right now. He’s not there for medals. He’s there because he feels he’s standing guard over us, our hopes and our dreams. And some young Marine is patrolling the sinister streets of some hostile Iraqi city. He didn’t have to be there. He’s there because he believes in three things, which our enemies inside this society and outside of it, hold in contempt: duty, country, and honor.
These servicemen and women represent America in the most profound sense. The Left’s idea of supporting the troops is having them standing guard over the Artic refuge. But whatever tepid statements the Left may make about supporting the troops, the Left regards the troops as members of some foreign and not very appealing society, as mercenaries whose role is to protect our evil empire.
In truth, these soldiers of ours are not just part of America; they’re the best of America. They’re its heart and soul. They’re America without doubts. They’re America do or die.
Consider the four people we’re honoring tonight: a New York Jew, a farm boy from Georgia, a young woman from Kentucky, a Mexican-American from Southern California. This is not the artificially engineered diversity of the freshman Ivy League class. This is a real diversity of America, the many that make us one. This is the DNA of our country.
In the mid-1980s, when David and I were taking aim at the Left where we’d lived for so long, we saw many people we had once considered enemies. One of them was Senator Jeremiah Denton from Alabama. You remember him: the courageous POW from the Hanoi Hilton who blinked torture in Morse code with his eyelids when he was being tormented into appearing before some socialist TV crew.
In an act of foolishness that was extreme even for us at that time, David and I, when POW Jeremiah Denton was released—the first man to come out, I believe—put him on the cover of Ramparts, the radical magazine that we edited. We showed him as the abject puppet on the lap of a malicious Richard Nixon, who was making him say, “Say ‘peace with honor,’ soldier.”
About 12 years later, in the mid-80s, we were introduced to Denton and we quickly apologized. His response? “Don’t worry about it.” He put his arm about both of our shoulders. “What I did, I did to protect you and your right to say what you wanted.” That pushed both of us on the road to reparations for what we and our Destructive Generation had done, a road from which we have never since departed. You know something of where that path has taken David.
In my own case, a lucky turn was provided, as John said, by my friend Wally Nunn, a couple of years ago. Wally was involved with the Medal of Honor Foundation. A photographer named Nick Del Calzo had done extraordinary formal portraits of the 130-odd living recipients of the Medal of Honor. They needed somebody to write these profiles. I volunteered. It became really an act of contrition and ultimately an act of love and, I hope at least, an act of self-forgiveness.
I talked to them all over the next few months, mostly by phone. Often I will tell you I had tears running down my cheeks. Not so much for them because they, in William Faulkner’s famous Nobel Prize phrase, had not only endured, but they had prevailed. But I had tears in my eyes for the rest of us. When I was a boy, people like Jimmy Doolittle and Audie Murphy loomed large in the national imagination, and they made the national imagination bigger—and better. But then in the ‘60s, we lost sight of our heroes, just as we were losing our way as a nation.
At the time I was doing this book, I thought about these guys and how they should be household names. I thought of James Agee’s famous phrase, “Let us now praise famous men.”
About the Medal of Honor: It was established in 1861. In the next few decades, a lot of medals were promiscuously given out. People applied for them. Whole units in the Civil War were given them. In 1916, a panel of review took back about a third of those awarded, although in time, some of them would be re-awarded, notably to people like Buffalo Bill Cody and Mary Walker, the Civil War nurse who was the only woman ever to get a Medal of Honor. Up until World War II, civilians like Admiral Byrd and Charles Lindbergh were given Medals of Honor.
In 1963, the criteria were finally established by Congress, which is why the Medal is sometimes referred to as the Congressional Medal of Honor. The criteria include the following. The act must of bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous that it is clearly distinguished from other what might be called normally brave acts, the kinds of acts that would awe any of us. The act must involve possible loss of life, and some 60 percent of the medals are awarded posthumously. The act must be authenticated by two independent witnesses, which in a sense is a reminder of Bill Bennett’s phrase about true character being people doing the right thing when nobody is looking. There are a lot of people in the military who have earned the Medal of Honor when there was nobody looking.
Finally, the recommendation must go through the ranks and be signed off on by the president. So the Medal stands atop other medals in what is referred to as the “Pyramid of Honor.” It is the only medal worn around the neck. Its recipients are the only people the president of United States automatically salutes. It is under constant review to make sure that justice is done.
In 1997, seven black servicemen from World War II who had been unfairly passed over were awarded the Medal. In 2000, it went to 22 Asian-Americans who had been passed over, many of them in the famous 440-second “Go-for-Broke” Nisei unit, including Senator Daniel Inouye.
The same year, it went to Theodore Roosevelt posthumously. I wrote a book on Theodore Roosevelt. This was a man who achieved everything he wanted in life, except the Medal of Honor. In the end, he got it and is one of the only two father-and-son teams to have received the Medal of Honor.
These heroes are something of a paradox. They served in a democratic fighting force, which, as military historians like Victor Davis Hanson and others have told us, is effective precisely because it is democratic. Yet they step out of the fog of war as an aristocracy of valor. What they did in battle is simply extraordinary. As I talked to them about the engagements in which they had been involved, I couldn’t help but think that we’re dealing here with something like a modern American Iliad. Like Homer’s heroes, many of the soldiers engaged in epic, hand-to-hand battle, killing five, ten, twenty—in the case of a Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio at the Battle of the Bulge—over 100 of the enemy.
Yet these stories are not just about killing. More than one of them told me that the first thing they did after the engagement in which they distinguished themselves was to look for a church somewhere so they could pray for the comrades they’d lost and for the people whose lives they’d been forced to take.
What these men did in battle is so extraordinary that it makes us wonder about our assumptions about ourselves and about human nature itself. What they did raises those kinds of questions that we ask without ever expecting answers. Why do some people rise to the occasion when there are so many compelling reasons of self-preservation not to do it? What is the genetic code of courage? What experiences produce somebody willing to give up everything for comrades and countrymen?
I asked these men these big questions. Some talked of duty and honor. Others said they just couldn’t let their buddies down. Some said, “I figured I was going to die, so I was take some of them down with me when I went.” Others felt they were in the hand of God.
But they all believed this one thing: that on this day they were called upon to do something extraordinary. They believed that they didn’t win a medal, but they did something that allowed them to hold it in trust for all those who might have received it, if their sacrifice had been able to be recognized – for all those who served, for all those who didn’t come home.
There is continuity between these extraordinary men and the people serving at what we would consider the lowest level. One of those heroes, John Hawk, who fought a one-man duel with a detachment of German Panzers in a place called the Falaise Pocket in 1944, pretty much spoke for all of them when he told me, “Here’s the bottom line: I came when I was called, and I did the best I could.”
They say a nation is defined by its heroes. If so, we Americans are very fortunate indeed. The men who received the Medal of Honor and the young men and young woman whom we honor tonight as we mark the passing of the torch of heroism from one generation to another, give us confidence that this country of ours which our enemies foolishly underestimate and which we ourselves sometimes worry has lost its footing, is really the growing ground for courage, determination, and guts. You’ve heard this before, but it’s true. We’re the land of the free for one reason and one reason only: because we’re the home of the brave.
I’m proud to be involved with this book. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a keepsake book, and the Medal of Honor Foundation uses the revenue generated by this book to send these extraordinary men around to schools, service clubs, around to the parts of the country that need to hear their story.
I told you earlier that this evening is about the passing of the torch. Now that part of the evening has arrived. It’s a touching moment in a way, because it means heroism is not just something that stopped in 1971 or 1972. It’s something that is with us today.
I’m going to start by introducing our honored guests according to rank, beginning with General James Livingston.
As a young captain, Jim Livingston was the head of a company of Marines in April 1968, when he was sent to defend a bridge near Dong Ha in the Quang Tri province. A nearby company nearby got in trouble. Livingston went on to join them and support them. Carrying his M-2 grease gun through the fire-swept rice paddy, he was hit twice with grenades but refused to take treatment. He personally killed 14 of the enemy before securing his position and relieving the other company. He was left with 35 able-bodied men out of the hundred in his command.
Soon he heard over the radio desperate calls for help from yet another Marine company. He charged to the rescue at the head of his remaining men. When his machine gun failed, he asked one of his riflemen for his weapon and used it to kill single-handedly another 11 of the enemy. When it was time finally to withdraw after this position had been secured, Gen. Livingston, who had been shot through the thigh in addition to his other wounds and wasn’t able to walk, told his men to go; he’d stay behind and cover them. Two Marines disobeyed, probably the first time and the last time they ever did, and picked him up and carried him out with them. General Livingston.
Major General James E. Livingston: Thank you very much. Let me say to Peter, he is absolutely one of my favorite people and he has done such a remarkable job with this book. Ultimately we hope to see this book in every public school in this nation. Anyone who wants to get involved, we would certainly encourage you to do so.
Let me also acknowledge one of the members of the Board, Wally Nunn. Wally Nunn was in a helicopter above me on the same day of this battle and, without guys like Wally Nunn and his excellent air support, I would not be here tonight. So, Wally, God bless you. I couldn’t give up on Wally. We finally drafted him to the chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation, and he is doing an absolutely great job. We raise about a million dollars a year in the New York Stock Exchange, and it’s under Wally’s leadership.
Let me also acknowledge David Horowitz. David, I recall as a young officer that we had a little philosophical disconnect. But it’s great to see that you have now been baptized a conservative.
To understand Marines, you have to understand the term “politically correct” is considered with pure disdain by Marines. I also note the fact that most civilians don’t have a clue what makes a Marine tick and that’s not a bad thing because, if they really knew, it’d scare the hell out of them. Several years ago, an elected member of Congress, obviously a Democrat, felt compelled to publicly accuse the Marine Corps of being “radical” and “extreme.” Marines like the fact that our commandant, our four-star leader, informed the member of Congress that the accusations were absolutely correct and that he considered the comment a compliment.
With that said, I am honored to introduce to one of the world’s finest heroes, the holder of the gate to our corps, Sergeant Scott Montoya. He was born in Los Angeles, and he joined the Marine Corps on May 15, 1994. He served with the Second Battalion 23rd Marines as a scout sniper. His additional duty was as a martial arts instructor. His civilian job is a sheriff deputy for 15 years with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Scott is a real hero. Scott is the recipient of the Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor. Let me read Scott’s citation.
The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Sergeant Scott C. Montoya, United States Marine Corps Reserves, for service set forth in the following citation. For extraordinary heroism as a Scout Sniper, Scout Snapper Platoon Second Battalion 23rd Marines, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 8 April 2003.
During the battle for Baghdad, Sergeant Montoya’s sniper team arrived within a company and held their position as they came under heavy, small-arms fire from a determined enemy force. He immediately encouraged Marines to deploy and return fire. Noticing a disabled civilian vehicle on the road in the line of fire and with complete disregard for his own safety, he rushed forward and missed a hail of gunfire and dragged a wounded Iraqi civilian to safety. Observing a Marine struggling to get off the same fire-swept street, he risked his life again. He repeated this same action four times during that battle.
Scott is one of the real heroes and the key to the Corps and the key to America. Let me now introduce you to this fine Marine. Scott, come up and be introduced.
Peter Collier: This award says, “Your courage and character ennoble us all. Thanks from [Restoration] Weekend.”
Sergeant Scott Montoya: I’m not a professional speaker. I can barely say my own name from time to time. But I want to share with you a quick little story I used to teach my Marines. It starts off like this. Every day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up and that gazelle knows that he has to run faster than the fastest lion or he’ll be killed and eaten. And every day in Africa, a lion wakes up and that lion knows he has to run faster than the slowest gazelle, or else he’ll starve to death. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or the gazelle: wake up every day running.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight. I didn’t know what to say, so I carry a little book with me. When I was over in Iraq, they call it “the little green monster.” All Marines carry it. We carry it in our cargo pocket. It is my log of war, and I’d like to read you something from it.
Thursday, 10/24. Wow, how can I say it? My first firefight and like three since then. My first kill and who knows what else. I would have written sooner, but I haven’t had the words. I love and miss my family, most of all my horses. I would say that in the beginning of firefight combat, it’s almost like watching a video game. Everything appears so fast and then you have moments of clarity, like alcoholics would say. The smoke and the gunfire come from all directions and the artillery is so loud, you never get used to the explosion.
I shot a man today, popping his head out of a tower, and he went down. It happened so fast, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I know that his family will grieve for him often. I don’t know what to say about him.
This country is just riddled with war and death. Most of the locals are just farmers. They raise goats and herd sheep. They live in a time past Western Civilization and culture. They don’t even have TVs and some barely have radios. The buildings are shacks made from poor construction and not many have running water. They mostly have water wells and they farm and live with the dust, the wind and the war. Wow, how some of these Iraqi soldiers hate us. If they ever captured us, they would torture and kill us for sure.
I’m not sure where all this anger comes from but it’s very ugly. The people seem very scared of us. They mostly just want food from us and the men want our smokes. The other ones want us dead. They fly black and red flags over the homes in support of Saddam and his military. They also look at us and what we’re doing, and report back to their officials on our combat development teams.
This story happened to me yesterday and I felt so compelled to write it down. I wasn’t sure where to start. We were blocking the intersection and shutting down what little traffic they had in the small city. There were no traffic lights, stop signs, lane dividers. It’s just “drive where you want.”
Anyway, we had these four Marines that were blocking off a section with a Humvee. They cut off all four intersections that we had under watch. They used to call us snipers “guardian angels” or “archangels.” We stood on top of the building and we looked down on the crowd. One guy had a 50 cal on top of his Humvee and stood on it. His gun was mounted just on top of his roof and he was sitting behind it. There was two cars that approached the vehicle. We had the intersection cut off.
One car started coming towards the Marine. The second car stopped and turned around. The Marine immediately went for his 50-cal and tried to fire at the driver. His gun jammed so he picked up his M16 and shot the driver that was approaching him fast.
You’re probably thinking, “Did he live or did he die?” Well the story tells itself of course. He was hit through the windshield and then we moved into position to overwatch for the sector of the street. I looked over to the area and walked down to the street where the car was sitting. I noticed some Marines were looking into the vehicle and then they walked away.
When I arrived, I noticed the man lying on his stomach across the seat, gasping for air. It was the type of labored breathing you hear when people are struggling to hold onto their life. He was gurgling and he was obviously on his way out. I got a little mad that everyone was just watching him. He was sitting there dying. I asked a corpsman with me if there’s anything we could do. He said he couldn’t treat his head wounds because he was in the vehicle. I took that to heart. I pulled him out of the car and onto the ground by his feet. He was in bad shape and bleeding. He was gurgling. The weird part was that all the Marines were scared. I was mad that nobody was helping him and I asked the corps man to help. He said the only thing he could do was to open his airway with a trach tube and a bandage. He already had a bandage on his head and he was just lying in the middle of the street.
I had my camera and had never seen anything like that before, so I took his picture. I’m not sure why I did that to this day but I just thought it was amazing. What a terrible grasp of breath he gave just before he left. I couldn’t keep all the emotions inside me so I just blamed on I wanted to be tough and I wanted to get a picture. It seems that the war brings out the best and worst of everybody. For me, I know that there’ll be another day and another firefight tomorrow.
Once again, that’s just my personal opinion. That doesn’t reflect on anybody in the Marine Corps. Those are just some of my personal thoughts that I kept in my book, and because I’m not a great speaker, I just wanted to share that from my heart. Thank you for treating me so well and I want to say that the Medal of Honor winners the Marine Corps awarded me with the Navy Cross but, like them, I know that I stood on the shoulders of legends that came before me.
I hold that integrity that Marine Corps spirit very, very close to my heart and because they gave me award doesn’t make me a better person. It just lets me be the keeper of a torch. And, hopefully, the young Marines will take on my torch and pass it on and will live on the legacy. Hurrah.
Collier: Now Colonel Jack Jacobs, who is part of our organization and you know him, but you probably don’t what he did. In 1968, he was a young lieutenant advising South Vietnamese infantry battalion in the Mekong Delta. They were suddenly ambushed by a large enemy force hidden in bunkers with no place to hide. Many of the South Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the first few seconds of the attack. Shrapnel from a mortar round tore off the top of Jack’s head. Most of the bones in his face were broken, and he was unable to see out of one eye.
As South Vietnamese troops began to panic and as their officers were shot, he took control. He dragged a badly wounded American sergeant who was with him, and probably outweighed him by 70 pounds. He dragged him out to safety. He kept going back to the fire-swept field to save others, over and over again. He killed three Vietcong who stood in his way and finally brought out, by the end of the day, 13 of his comrades, before losing consciousness. It took over a dozen operations to piece his skull and his face back together again.
Col. Jack Jacobs.
Colonel Jack Jacobs: Thanks very much. In about the last nine months or so, I’ve been visiting in the Middle East twice to visit the troops. The last time I went was about a month ago. I’m here to report to you that your soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines and their morale are outstanding.
And I visited all these places: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, UAE, Djibouti. They’re all absolutely magnificent kids and, when I say “kids,” I’m not kidding. They really are only kids. I went aboard the U.S.S. Teddy Roosevelt and I’m telling you, the instant I stepped aboard, I single-handedly raised the average age on board by 10 years. It’s kind of horrifying, when you think about it.
But they’re all doing spectacularly well. Where do we get kids like this? Well, we get them from small and big towns, and small and big cities across the United States, in places where they teach our children the value and the love of freedom and the price we have to pay for it sometime, that it takes courage and sacrifice. Otherwise, people who hate us will destroy us.
Thankfully we’ve raised a generation of kids who can take the torch, who have learned these things and who have exemplified the very finest that is the United States and who treasure freedom and know that the price sometimes has to be paid in order for us to keep it.
Among them, and one of the best examples of that kind of dedication is Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, United States Army military police. About a year ago, she was accompanying a convoy on the outskirts of Baghdad when it was ambushed. Now I’ve been ambushed plenty of times and some of you have, too, and I can tell you and those of you who have been ambushes know that the only way to defeat an ambush is to do something that’s completely counter-intuitive and the thing that you least want to do, and that is to attack the ambush. It is the only way you’re going to be able to defeat the ambush. Often people don’t do that, but Sergeant Hester did. She maneuvered her team through the kill zone to get into a position to flank the enemy and thereafter destroyed the ambush and, in the process, killed more than two dozen enemy insurgents.
For her heroic actions, she was awarded the Silver Star and, to my knowledge, is the only woman in American history ever to receive the award for close combat. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very proud to present to you Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester.
Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester: Thank you. I’m not a great speaker myself. I was actually pretty unprepared for this. I want to say thank you very much. It’s great to be here. If you would have asked me a year ago, or if you had told me a year ago that I would be standing here in front of you today, accepting this, or even being awarded the Silver Star, I would have laughed in your face point blank. If you’d have asked me a year ago, whether I would be here at all today, I would have told you, “I don’t know.”
I just want to thank you and I accept this on behalf of all the soldiers, all the men and women in the military and please remember tonight those who cannot be here with us. The fallen comrades, the ones that are deployed today overseas, the ones who don’t know if they’re coming back. The ones who are away from their families, their friends, and their loved ones. Thank you.
O’Neill: That was a wonderful group of people. I’d like to introduce to you one more wonderful person. I’m tremendously proud to introduce Senator Jim Bunning. From the time I was a little kid, he was hero to me and to many others. He was a fabulous pitcher for the Detroit Tigers and later the Philadelphia Phillies. Year after year, he had fabulous seasons but with no self-promotion. He was just a great pitcher but more wonderful than his pitching skills to all of us was his character. He was always the quiet, dependable pitcher that exemplified all of the American values, all the things people looked for in baseball.
Senator, if the Tigers couldn’t break the Yankees’ stronghold, it wasn’t because they didn’t have a great pitcher. It also wasn’t because there weren’t a lot of kids like me hoping that you won.
At the end of his career, he was of course voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. He has a wonderful family and a fabulous wife, Mary. They have nine children. I suppose he could have just gone home with those kids and had a legacy that would have been greater than almost anybody else could have imagined.
Instead, he didn’t. After a time, he joined the Reagan Revolution. He was elected to Congress from Kentucky’s Fourth District. He ran and was elected, and then re-elected to the United States Senate. He was and is the same type of Senator that he was a player. His character is an inspiration to all of us, not a self-promoter or a headline-grabber, but year after year, always there and always right on the important issues. I’m very honored to introduce Senator Jim Bunning.
Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY): Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that everybody’s still here. My wife and I have been to five of these Restoration Weekends. They kind of recharge your batteries, don’t they? I spent 22 years as a professional athlete. I will have surpassed that in public service by about five years after this year in the Senate, and I’m impressed with our young people that we’re honoring here tonight.
I want to say something about some of our service people from Kentucky. I flew into Baghdad about three years ago and did the diversion landing so they didn’t shoot you down as you come in. When I got off the aircraft in Baghdad, I was taken into a reception room and 45 of the nicest people met me at that airport. They were all from the Kentucky National Guard. They were part of the 120 people from the Guard who had been given the responsibility of guarding the perimeter of Baghdad. I got to spend the day with some of them and then obviously went from the airport into the Green Zone, or Saddam’s palace and spoke with Paul Bremer and General Sanchez, General Dempsey.
Then, unbelievably, I got to fly to Mosul and meet with about 3,000 of the 121st Airborne Screaming Eagles out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the largest unit of service in Iraq. There are 20,000 there. They were there for 14 months. They are 20,000 right now, redeployed to the middle of Baghdad. They have lost more people defending your and my freedom in Baghdad and Iraq than any other unit that serves in the military right now. So it has been a tough, tough year for people at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and for all Kentuckians and for all Americans, for that matter.
But I want to give a special tribute to our sergeant from Bowling Green, Warren County, Kentucky—unbelievably, the first woman in combat to win the Silver Star. The first ever. That’s kind of special. It just shows something about home values, values that Kentuckians hold dear and I hope that everybody in this gathering holds dear, and I’m sure they do.
Our young people have taken up their responsibility better than we expected. I had two sons in the service, one in the Navy and one who just got out of the Air Force. He fought in the first Gulf War and got injured in Afghanistan. But I can tell you this: if our youth and those serving in our military are a result of us here and our general in the Marine Corps and all of those who serve under him and those parents and these young people represent those parents, I feel very proud of the fact that this country, in spite of all of its warts, will survive and thrive into the 21st and 22nd century.
Thank you all for coming to this weekend. It means a great deal to recharge your batteries and get a refocus on what’s going on in the United States of America at this time. It’s hard to get a good picture because of our tilted media, but believe me, if you look at these young people who are serving us in the military, you know exactly how I feel every day when I’m on the Senate floor and realize that those young people represent me. I will do my best to make sure that they have the best equipment and everything that they need to pursue their war and our war against terrorists—not terror, but terrorists.
Get that into your mind because, unless you put a face behind terror, you will never have the resolve that these young people have because they see the terrorists every day in the war. And so, God bless you for being here. We appreciate all the work that you do on behalf of the United States and, David, thank you again for inviting me. Amen.
Ellie
By FrontPage Magazine
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 24, 2006
This dinner and salute to our troops took place on Saturday, February 25, 2006, at the Restoration Weekend at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. -- The Editors.
John O’Neill: Before we begin the actual program, I’d like to recognize certain wonderful people who will come up over the course of the night. But I’d like to recognize one person who not on the program: Gunnery Sergeant Larry Carlson. He led a platoon in Fallujah. He’s home now safely, and he’s here. If he could stand up, I’d like to recognize him.
I’d like to say a brief word about a special project called the Soldiers’ Memorial Project set up to produce a statue to honor Scott Vallely and many other soldiers killed in the War on Terror.
The topic of tonight’s dinner is courage. There are many different kinds of courage. David mentioned my wife, Anne O’Neill. Another person of courage I think about is my old boss and friend, Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He hoped someday to come back here and retire in Phoenix but instead found himself very ill. He arose from his sick bed to swear in and provide to the oath to the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
Tonight, though, we are honoring with the courage without which this country would be absolutely nothing. That is the courage of our soldiers and sailors. Tonight, for the fifth time in my life, many of our military men and women are at war far from home, not really knowing if they’re going to make it through the night. Or to the next day. They’re unlikely heroes. They’re mostly just kids, ages 18-23, drawn from all over our country. But upon the thread of their courage hangs the fate of freedom throughout the world, our whole republic, and indeed much for the hope of the world. Amazingly, even in terrible times like the Battle of the Bulge, or the Chosin Reservoir, or Way City, or Caisson, those kids have never let us down.
In honoring them, we honor also our greatest heroes, the kids who never came home from those foreign lands, as well as the ideals of our republic itself.
Peter recently invested his time and effort to produce the book Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty to honor all living recipients of the Medal of Honor. He did this as a labor of love. As a result, Peter probably knows more Medal of Honor recipients than anyone that you can imagine, and we all owe a debt to his work, which I understood took almost two years.
I’d like to present Peter Collier who has rendered a tremendous service for the United States.
Peter Collier: I feel kind of like George C. Scott up here. We’re going to talk about medals tonight, medals and bravery and extraordinary acts that our servicemen and women give us freely and generously in the military equivalent of grace.
As we do that, as John said earlier, we need to remember that some young Army private is out there freezing in the mountains of Afghanistan tonight, right now. He’s not there for medals. He’s there because he feels he’s standing guard over us, our hopes and our dreams. And some young Marine is patrolling the sinister streets of some hostile Iraqi city. He didn’t have to be there. He’s there because he believes in three things, which our enemies inside this society and outside of it, hold in contempt: duty, country, and honor.
These servicemen and women represent America in the most profound sense. The Left’s idea of supporting the troops is having them standing guard over the Artic refuge. But whatever tepid statements the Left may make about supporting the troops, the Left regards the troops as members of some foreign and not very appealing society, as mercenaries whose role is to protect our evil empire.
In truth, these soldiers of ours are not just part of America; they’re the best of America. They’re its heart and soul. They’re America without doubts. They’re America do or die.
Consider the four people we’re honoring tonight: a New York Jew, a farm boy from Georgia, a young woman from Kentucky, a Mexican-American from Southern California. This is not the artificially engineered diversity of the freshman Ivy League class. This is a real diversity of America, the many that make us one. This is the DNA of our country.
In the mid-1980s, when David and I were taking aim at the Left where we’d lived for so long, we saw many people we had once considered enemies. One of them was Senator Jeremiah Denton from Alabama. You remember him: the courageous POW from the Hanoi Hilton who blinked torture in Morse code with his eyelids when he was being tormented into appearing before some socialist TV crew.
In an act of foolishness that was extreme even for us at that time, David and I, when POW Jeremiah Denton was released—the first man to come out, I believe—put him on the cover of Ramparts, the radical magazine that we edited. We showed him as the abject puppet on the lap of a malicious Richard Nixon, who was making him say, “Say ‘peace with honor,’ soldier.”
About 12 years later, in the mid-80s, we were introduced to Denton and we quickly apologized. His response? “Don’t worry about it.” He put his arm about both of our shoulders. “What I did, I did to protect you and your right to say what you wanted.” That pushed both of us on the road to reparations for what we and our Destructive Generation had done, a road from which we have never since departed. You know something of where that path has taken David.
In my own case, a lucky turn was provided, as John said, by my friend Wally Nunn, a couple of years ago. Wally was involved with the Medal of Honor Foundation. A photographer named Nick Del Calzo had done extraordinary formal portraits of the 130-odd living recipients of the Medal of Honor. They needed somebody to write these profiles. I volunteered. It became really an act of contrition and ultimately an act of love and, I hope at least, an act of self-forgiveness.
I talked to them all over the next few months, mostly by phone. Often I will tell you I had tears running down my cheeks. Not so much for them because they, in William Faulkner’s famous Nobel Prize phrase, had not only endured, but they had prevailed. But I had tears in my eyes for the rest of us. When I was a boy, people like Jimmy Doolittle and Audie Murphy loomed large in the national imagination, and they made the national imagination bigger—and better. But then in the ‘60s, we lost sight of our heroes, just as we were losing our way as a nation.
At the time I was doing this book, I thought about these guys and how they should be household names. I thought of James Agee’s famous phrase, “Let us now praise famous men.”
About the Medal of Honor: It was established in 1861. In the next few decades, a lot of medals were promiscuously given out. People applied for them. Whole units in the Civil War were given them. In 1916, a panel of review took back about a third of those awarded, although in time, some of them would be re-awarded, notably to people like Buffalo Bill Cody and Mary Walker, the Civil War nurse who was the only woman ever to get a Medal of Honor. Up until World War II, civilians like Admiral Byrd and Charles Lindbergh were given Medals of Honor.
In 1963, the criteria were finally established by Congress, which is why the Medal is sometimes referred to as the Congressional Medal of Honor. The criteria include the following. The act must of bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous that it is clearly distinguished from other what might be called normally brave acts, the kinds of acts that would awe any of us. The act must involve possible loss of life, and some 60 percent of the medals are awarded posthumously. The act must be authenticated by two independent witnesses, which in a sense is a reminder of Bill Bennett’s phrase about true character being people doing the right thing when nobody is looking. There are a lot of people in the military who have earned the Medal of Honor when there was nobody looking.
Finally, the recommendation must go through the ranks and be signed off on by the president. So the Medal stands atop other medals in what is referred to as the “Pyramid of Honor.” It is the only medal worn around the neck. Its recipients are the only people the president of United States automatically salutes. It is under constant review to make sure that justice is done.
In 1997, seven black servicemen from World War II who had been unfairly passed over were awarded the Medal. In 2000, it went to 22 Asian-Americans who had been passed over, many of them in the famous 440-second “Go-for-Broke” Nisei unit, including Senator Daniel Inouye.
The same year, it went to Theodore Roosevelt posthumously. I wrote a book on Theodore Roosevelt. This was a man who achieved everything he wanted in life, except the Medal of Honor. In the end, he got it and is one of the only two father-and-son teams to have received the Medal of Honor.
These heroes are something of a paradox. They served in a democratic fighting force, which, as military historians like Victor Davis Hanson and others have told us, is effective precisely because it is democratic. Yet they step out of the fog of war as an aristocracy of valor. What they did in battle is simply extraordinary. As I talked to them about the engagements in which they had been involved, I couldn’t help but think that we’re dealing here with something like a modern American Iliad. Like Homer’s heroes, many of the soldiers engaged in epic, hand-to-hand battle, killing five, ten, twenty—in the case of a Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio at the Battle of the Bulge—over 100 of the enemy.
Yet these stories are not just about killing. More than one of them told me that the first thing they did after the engagement in which they distinguished themselves was to look for a church somewhere so they could pray for the comrades they’d lost and for the people whose lives they’d been forced to take.
What these men did in battle is so extraordinary that it makes us wonder about our assumptions about ourselves and about human nature itself. What they did raises those kinds of questions that we ask without ever expecting answers. Why do some people rise to the occasion when there are so many compelling reasons of self-preservation not to do it? What is the genetic code of courage? What experiences produce somebody willing to give up everything for comrades and countrymen?
I asked these men these big questions. Some talked of duty and honor. Others said they just couldn’t let their buddies down. Some said, “I figured I was going to die, so I was take some of them down with me when I went.” Others felt they were in the hand of God.
But they all believed this one thing: that on this day they were called upon to do something extraordinary. They believed that they didn’t win a medal, but they did something that allowed them to hold it in trust for all those who might have received it, if their sacrifice had been able to be recognized – for all those who served, for all those who didn’t come home.
There is continuity between these extraordinary men and the people serving at what we would consider the lowest level. One of those heroes, John Hawk, who fought a one-man duel with a detachment of German Panzers in a place called the Falaise Pocket in 1944, pretty much spoke for all of them when he told me, “Here’s the bottom line: I came when I was called, and I did the best I could.”
They say a nation is defined by its heroes. If so, we Americans are very fortunate indeed. The men who received the Medal of Honor and the young men and young woman whom we honor tonight as we mark the passing of the torch of heroism from one generation to another, give us confidence that this country of ours which our enemies foolishly underestimate and which we ourselves sometimes worry has lost its footing, is really the growing ground for courage, determination, and guts. You’ve heard this before, but it’s true. We’re the land of the free for one reason and one reason only: because we’re the home of the brave.
I’m proud to be involved with this book. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a keepsake book, and the Medal of Honor Foundation uses the revenue generated by this book to send these extraordinary men around to schools, service clubs, around to the parts of the country that need to hear their story.
I told you earlier that this evening is about the passing of the torch. Now that part of the evening has arrived. It’s a touching moment in a way, because it means heroism is not just something that stopped in 1971 or 1972. It’s something that is with us today.
I’m going to start by introducing our honored guests according to rank, beginning with General James Livingston.
As a young captain, Jim Livingston was the head of a company of Marines in April 1968, when he was sent to defend a bridge near Dong Ha in the Quang Tri province. A nearby company nearby got in trouble. Livingston went on to join them and support them. Carrying his M-2 grease gun through the fire-swept rice paddy, he was hit twice with grenades but refused to take treatment. He personally killed 14 of the enemy before securing his position and relieving the other company. He was left with 35 able-bodied men out of the hundred in his command.
Soon he heard over the radio desperate calls for help from yet another Marine company. He charged to the rescue at the head of his remaining men. When his machine gun failed, he asked one of his riflemen for his weapon and used it to kill single-handedly another 11 of the enemy. When it was time finally to withdraw after this position had been secured, Gen. Livingston, who had been shot through the thigh in addition to his other wounds and wasn’t able to walk, told his men to go; he’d stay behind and cover them. Two Marines disobeyed, probably the first time and the last time they ever did, and picked him up and carried him out with them. General Livingston.
Major General James E. Livingston: Thank you very much. Let me say to Peter, he is absolutely one of my favorite people and he has done such a remarkable job with this book. Ultimately we hope to see this book in every public school in this nation. Anyone who wants to get involved, we would certainly encourage you to do so.
Let me also acknowledge one of the members of the Board, Wally Nunn. Wally Nunn was in a helicopter above me on the same day of this battle and, without guys like Wally Nunn and his excellent air support, I would not be here tonight. So, Wally, God bless you. I couldn’t give up on Wally. We finally drafted him to the chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation, and he is doing an absolutely great job. We raise about a million dollars a year in the New York Stock Exchange, and it’s under Wally’s leadership.
Let me also acknowledge David Horowitz. David, I recall as a young officer that we had a little philosophical disconnect. But it’s great to see that you have now been baptized a conservative.
To understand Marines, you have to understand the term “politically correct” is considered with pure disdain by Marines. I also note the fact that most civilians don’t have a clue what makes a Marine tick and that’s not a bad thing because, if they really knew, it’d scare the hell out of them. Several years ago, an elected member of Congress, obviously a Democrat, felt compelled to publicly accuse the Marine Corps of being “radical” and “extreme.” Marines like the fact that our commandant, our four-star leader, informed the member of Congress that the accusations were absolutely correct and that he considered the comment a compliment.
With that said, I am honored to introduce to one of the world’s finest heroes, the holder of the gate to our corps, Sergeant Scott Montoya. He was born in Los Angeles, and he joined the Marine Corps on May 15, 1994. He served with the Second Battalion 23rd Marines as a scout sniper. His additional duty was as a martial arts instructor. His civilian job is a sheriff deputy for 15 years with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Scott is a real hero. Scott is the recipient of the Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor. Let me read Scott’s citation.
The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Sergeant Scott C. Montoya, United States Marine Corps Reserves, for service set forth in the following citation. For extraordinary heroism as a Scout Sniper, Scout Snapper Platoon Second Battalion 23rd Marines, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 8 April 2003.
During the battle for Baghdad, Sergeant Montoya’s sniper team arrived within a company and held their position as they came under heavy, small-arms fire from a determined enemy force. He immediately encouraged Marines to deploy and return fire. Noticing a disabled civilian vehicle on the road in the line of fire and with complete disregard for his own safety, he rushed forward and missed a hail of gunfire and dragged a wounded Iraqi civilian to safety. Observing a Marine struggling to get off the same fire-swept street, he risked his life again. He repeated this same action four times during that battle.
Scott is one of the real heroes and the key to the Corps and the key to America. Let me now introduce you to this fine Marine. Scott, come up and be introduced.
Peter Collier: This award says, “Your courage and character ennoble us all. Thanks from [Restoration] Weekend.”
Sergeant Scott Montoya: I’m not a professional speaker. I can barely say my own name from time to time. But I want to share with you a quick little story I used to teach my Marines. It starts off like this. Every day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up and that gazelle knows that he has to run faster than the fastest lion or he’ll be killed and eaten. And every day in Africa, a lion wakes up and that lion knows he has to run faster than the slowest gazelle, or else he’ll starve to death. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or the gazelle: wake up every day running.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight. I didn’t know what to say, so I carry a little book with me. When I was over in Iraq, they call it “the little green monster.” All Marines carry it. We carry it in our cargo pocket. It is my log of war, and I’d like to read you something from it.
Thursday, 10/24. Wow, how can I say it? My first firefight and like three since then. My first kill and who knows what else. I would have written sooner, but I haven’t had the words. I love and miss my family, most of all my horses. I would say that in the beginning of firefight combat, it’s almost like watching a video game. Everything appears so fast and then you have moments of clarity, like alcoholics would say. The smoke and the gunfire come from all directions and the artillery is so loud, you never get used to the explosion.
I shot a man today, popping his head out of a tower, and he went down. It happened so fast, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I know that his family will grieve for him often. I don’t know what to say about him.
This country is just riddled with war and death. Most of the locals are just farmers. They raise goats and herd sheep. They live in a time past Western Civilization and culture. They don’t even have TVs and some barely have radios. The buildings are shacks made from poor construction and not many have running water. They mostly have water wells and they farm and live with the dust, the wind and the war. Wow, how some of these Iraqi soldiers hate us. If they ever captured us, they would torture and kill us for sure.
I’m not sure where all this anger comes from but it’s very ugly. The people seem very scared of us. They mostly just want food from us and the men want our smokes. The other ones want us dead. They fly black and red flags over the homes in support of Saddam and his military. They also look at us and what we’re doing, and report back to their officials on our combat development teams.
This story happened to me yesterday and I felt so compelled to write it down. I wasn’t sure where to start. We were blocking the intersection and shutting down what little traffic they had in the small city. There were no traffic lights, stop signs, lane dividers. It’s just “drive where you want.”
Anyway, we had these four Marines that were blocking off a section with a Humvee. They cut off all four intersections that we had under watch. They used to call us snipers “guardian angels” or “archangels.” We stood on top of the building and we looked down on the crowd. One guy had a 50 cal on top of his Humvee and stood on it. His gun was mounted just on top of his roof and he was sitting behind it. There was two cars that approached the vehicle. We had the intersection cut off.
One car started coming towards the Marine. The second car stopped and turned around. The Marine immediately went for his 50-cal and tried to fire at the driver. His gun jammed so he picked up his M16 and shot the driver that was approaching him fast.
You’re probably thinking, “Did he live or did he die?” Well the story tells itself of course. He was hit through the windshield and then we moved into position to overwatch for the sector of the street. I looked over to the area and walked down to the street where the car was sitting. I noticed some Marines were looking into the vehicle and then they walked away.
When I arrived, I noticed the man lying on his stomach across the seat, gasping for air. It was the type of labored breathing you hear when people are struggling to hold onto their life. He was gurgling and he was obviously on his way out. I got a little mad that everyone was just watching him. He was sitting there dying. I asked a corpsman with me if there’s anything we could do. He said he couldn’t treat his head wounds because he was in the vehicle. I took that to heart. I pulled him out of the car and onto the ground by his feet. He was in bad shape and bleeding. He was gurgling. The weird part was that all the Marines were scared. I was mad that nobody was helping him and I asked the corps man to help. He said the only thing he could do was to open his airway with a trach tube and a bandage. He already had a bandage on his head and he was just lying in the middle of the street.
I had my camera and had never seen anything like that before, so I took his picture. I’m not sure why I did that to this day but I just thought it was amazing. What a terrible grasp of breath he gave just before he left. I couldn’t keep all the emotions inside me so I just blamed on I wanted to be tough and I wanted to get a picture. It seems that the war brings out the best and worst of everybody. For me, I know that there’ll be another day and another firefight tomorrow.
Once again, that’s just my personal opinion. That doesn’t reflect on anybody in the Marine Corps. Those are just some of my personal thoughts that I kept in my book, and because I’m not a great speaker, I just wanted to share that from my heart. Thank you for treating me so well and I want to say that the Medal of Honor winners the Marine Corps awarded me with the Navy Cross but, like them, I know that I stood on the shoulders of legends that came before me.
I hold that integrity that Marine Corps spirit very, very close to my heart and because they gave me award doesn’t make me a better person. It just lets me be the keeper of a torch. And, hopefully, the young Marines will take on my torch and pass it on and will live on the legacy. Hurrah.
Collier: Now Colonel Jack Jacobs, who is part of our organization and you know him, but you probably don’t what he did. In 1968, he was a young lieutenant advising South Vietnamese infantry battalion in the Mekong Delta. They were suddenly ambushed by a large enemy force hidden in bunkers with no place to hide. Many of the South Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the first few seconds of the attack. Shrapnel from a mortar round tore off the top of Jack’s head. Most of the bones in his face were broken, and he was unable to see out of one eye.
As South Vietnamese troops began to panic and as their officers were shot, he took control. He dragged a badly wounded American sergeant who was with him, and probably outweighed him by 70 pounds. He dragged him out to safety. He kept going back to the fire-swept field to save others, over and over again. He killed three Vietcong who stood in his way and finally brought out, by the end of the day, 13 of his comrades, before losing consciousness. It took over a dozen operations to piece his skull and his face back together again.
Col. Jack Jacobs.
Colonel Jack Jacobs: Thanks very much. In about the last nine months or so, I’ve been visiting in the Middle East twice to visit the troops. The last time I went was about a month ago. I’m here to report to you that your soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines and their morale are outstanding.
And I visited all these places: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, UAE, Djibouti. They’re all absolutely magnificent kids and, when I say “kids,” I’m not kidding. They really are only kids. I went aboard the U.S.S. Teddy Roosevelt and I’m telling you, the instant I stepped aboard, I single-handedly raised the average age on board by 10 years. It’s kind of horrifying, when you think about it.
But they’re all doing spectacularly well. Where do we get kids like this? Well, we get them from small and big towns, and small and big cities across the United States, in places where they teach our children the value and the love of freedom and the price we have to pay for it sometime, that it takes courage and sacrifice. Otherwise, people who hate us will destroy us.
Thankfully we’ve raised a generation of kids who can take the torch, who have learned these things and who have exemplified the very finest that is the United States and who treasure freedom and know that the price sometimes has to be paid in order for us to keep it.
Among them, and one of the best examples of that kind of dedication is Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, United States Army military police. About a year ago, she was accompanying a convoy on the outskirts of Baghdad when it was ambushed. Now I’ve been ambushed plenty of times and some of you have, too, and I can tell you and those of you who have been ambushes know that the only way to defeat an ambush is to do something that’s completely counter-intuitive and the thing that you least want to do, and that is to attack the ambush. It is the only way you’re going to be able to defeat the ambush. Often people don’t do that, but Sergeant Hester did. She maneuvered her team through the kill zone to get into a position to flank the enemy and thereafter destroyed the ambush and, in the process, killed more than two dozen enemy insurgents.
For her heroic actions, she was awarded the Silver Star and, to my knowledge, is the only woman in American history ever to receive the award for close combat. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very proud to present to you Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester.
Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester: Thank you. I’m not a great speaker myself. I was actually pretty unprepared for this. I want to say thank you very much. It’s great to be here. If you would have asked me a year ago, or if you had told me a year ago that I would be standing here in front of you today, accepting this, or even being awarded the Silver Star, I would have laughed in your face point blank. If you’d have asked me a year ago, whether I would be here at all today, I would have told you, “I don’t know.”
I just want to thank you and I accept this on behalf of all the soldiers, all the men and women in the military and please remember tonight those who cannot be here with us. The fallen comrades, the ones that are deployed today overseas, the ones who don’t know if they’re coming back. The ones who are away from their families, their friends, and their loved ones. Thank you.
O’Neill: That was a wonderful group of people. I’d like to introduce to you one more wonderful person. I’m tremendously proud to introduce Senator Jim Bunning. From the time I was a little kid, he was hero to me and to many others. He was a fabulous pitcher for the Detroit Tigers and later the Philadelphia Phillies. Year after year, he had fabulous seasons but with no self-promotion. He was just a great pitcher but more wonderful than his pitching skills to all of us was his character. He was always the quiet, dependable pitcher that exemplified all of the American values, all the things people looked for in baseball.
Senator, if the Tigers couldn’t break the Yankees’ stronghold, it wasn’t because they didn’t have a great pitcher. It also wasn’t because there weren’t a lot of kids like me hoping that you won.
At the end of his career, he was of course voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. He has a wonderful family and a fabulous wife, Mary. They have nine children. I suppose he could have just gone home with those kids and had a legacy that would have been greater than almost anybody else could have imagined.
Instead, he didn’t. After a time, he joined the Reagan Revolution. He was elected to Congress from Kentucky’s Fourth District. He ran and was elected, and then re-elected to the United States Senate. He was and is the same type of Senator that he was a player. His character is an inspiration to all of us, not a self-promoter or a headline-grabber, but year after year, always there and always right on the important issues. I’m very honored to introduce Senator Jim Bunning.
Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY): Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that everybody’s still here. My wife and I have been to five of these Restoration Weekends. They kind of recharge your batteries, don’t they? I spent 22 years as a professional athlete. I will have surpassed that in public service by about five years after this year in the Senate, and I’m impressed with our young people that we’re honoring here tonight.
I want to say something about some of our service people from Kentucky. I flew into Baghdad about three years ago and did the diversion landing so they didn’t shoot you down as you come in. When I got off the aircraft in Baghdad, I was taken into a reception room and 45 of the nicest people met me at that airport. They were all from the Kentucky National Guard. They were part of the 120 people from the Guard who had been given the responsibility of guarding the perimeter of Baghdad. I got to spend the day with some of them and then obviously went from the airport into the Green Zone, or Saddam’s palace and spoke with Paul Bremer and General Sanchez, General Dempsey.
Then, unbelievably, I got to fly to Mosul and meet with about 3,000 of the 121st Airborne Screaming Eagles out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the largest unit of service in Iraq. There are 20,000 there. They were there for 14 months. They are 20,000 right now, redeployed to the middle of Baghdad. They have lost more people defending your and my freedom in Baghdad and Iraq than any other unit that serves in the military right now. So it has been a tough, tough year for people at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and for all Kentuckians and for all Americans, for that matter.
But I want to give a special tribute to our sergeant from Bowling Green, Warren County, Kentucky—unbelievably, the first woman in combat to win the Silver Star. The first ever. That’s kind of special. It just shows something about home values, values that Kentuckians hold dear and I hope that everybody in this gathering holds dear, and I’m sure they do.
Our young people have taken up their responsibility better than we expected. I had two sons in the service, one in the Navy and one who just got out of the Air Force. He fought in the first Gulf War and got injured in Afghanistan. But I can tell you this: if our youth and those serving in our military are a result of us here and our general in the Marine Corps and all of those who serve under him and those parents and these young people represent those parents, I feel very proud of the fact that this country, in spite of all of its warts, will survive and thrive into the 21st and 22nd century.
Thank you all for coming to this weekend. It means a great deal to recharge your batteries and get a refocus on what’s going on in the United States of America at this time. It’s hard to get a good picture because of our tilted media, but believe me, if you look at these young people who are serving us in the military, you know exactly how I feel every day when I’m on the Senate floor and realize that those young people represent me. I will do my best to make sure that they have the best equipment and everything that they need to pursue their war and our war against terrorists—not terror, but terrorists.
Get that into your mind because, unless you put a face behind terror, you will never have the resolve that these young people have because they see the terrorists every day in the war. And so, God bless you for being here. We appreciate all the work that you do on behalf of the United States and, David, thank you again for inviting me. Amen.
Ellie