Bill Nelson: “The National Guard has performed magnificently, heroically, and with great professional skill, as well as patriotism.…”

“The National Guard has performed magnificently, heroically, and with great professional skill, as well as patriotism. When I wore the uniform of this country as a member of the U.S. Army Active-Duty back in the late 1960s, the National Guard was a much different creature. Today, as the Presiding Officer so well knows, the National Guard is, in many cases, as skilled as, if not even more skilled in particular skills, the regular Army. Thus, when we encounter a threat to the interests of the United States and have to respond abroad, as we have both in Afghanistan and Iraq--especially in Iraq but before that in the Balkans--the National Guard is called on to supply so many of those troops. My wife and I make it a point on holidays such as Thanksgiving to have Thanksgiving dinner with troops in different parts of the world. One time we found ourselves with our troops in Bosnia. At that particular point in one of those camps out in the fields where we had that Thanksgiving dinner, of that entire U.S. military force, which was our ninth year in Bosnia helping stabilize that place from the fratricide and killing that occurred there before, lo and behold, who were those troops? Those troops were the National Guard.”