Political Quotes

“Thank you so much, Congresswoman Davis. I yield to my colleague from Washington State, Congressman Jim McDermott. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I applaud my colleague from Arizona for bringing this issue to the floor. Forty-five years ago, I was a part of another era when there was a draft, and everybody was subject to that draft. In 1975, we stopped that draft, and we changed the nature of our military. We made it an all-voluntary military. What we've done in this country is we've taken 1 percent of the people and said, You volunteered for this. You go and do this for us. We buy the guns, the bullets, and everything else and send them out there. When they come back, we don't know them. There's a fascinating book, called, ``Breach of Trust,'' by a man named Andrew Bacevich. He is a colonel in the United States Army. He lost a son in Iraq, and he has written an incisive account of what the problem today is. The subtitle is ``How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.'' I know about PTSD because I dealt with it as a psychiatrist with people coming back from Vietnam. The kids that were in ``Apocalypse Now'' are the kids that came to my clinic. So I saw what people who went through tough war was all about. What is happening today that we do here on this floor--and I'm always uneasy when we do it--is we stand up and we have a moment of silence. It's nice. We should do it, and we do it. We thank people for their service.…”