Political Quotes

“I think you have also got to give a real set of kudos to the folks in the background. You know, we talk about the troops that are going out and they are finding the IEDs. We are talking to the C- 130 pilots who are flying in. You and I were there. It is a harsh environment. You got the dust, you got the sand, you got more sand, and then you throw a little bit of heat on it. When we were coming off the one plane in Erbil where we walked through the backwash of the props, it must have been 130, 140 degrees right there. Of course we were doing it for a short period of time. But you are wearing the body armor, you are wearing the helmet, our troops are doing that all day long. The other folks, there is lot of folks over there that deserve kudos, but it is the maintenance people. These guys would say, hey, we go out, we are near an explosion, an IED, our equipment is damaged. We bring it back, our mechanics know that they need to get this fixed, because we are going out again on patrol. They may have not a spare, but they have got another truck or another vehicle that they can take out. But, they have got to get this one working again. And the mechanics, they work 24 hours straight to get this stuff up and running. Same thing with the C-130s. We are putting lots of hours on some of these machines. I think the first plane that we flew in on from Kuwait to Baghdad was a 1961 C-130, from Selfridge Air Base in Michigan.…”