Bob Kerrey: “I will connect what I say here about this piece of legislation with Father's Day. I had the occasion, during our last…”

“I will connect what I say here about this piece of legislation with Father's Day. I had the occasion, during our last recess, to take my 23-year-old son and my 21-year-old daughter to Omaha Beach. I was in the audience on the 6th of June, 1994, in Antelope Park in Lincoln, NE, where, among other people, I heard at that time the senior Senator from Nebraska, Senator Exon, and many other speakers talk about that day on the 6th of June, 1944, when very young men crossed the English Channel in the early morning and, as they approached the beaches of Normandy in France--now quite quiet, now nowhere near as hostile as it was on that morning--the bullets from the German trenches rained down upon the beach. And the soldiers, as they approached the beach that morning, could hear the bullets raking the front of their landing craft. Those of us who have experienced bullets raking in any environment at all understand the courage that it took to lower those gates and leave those boats, knowing that it was highly likely that they were going to be shot and that it was even a higher probability, in those early landing craft, that they would die. On the occasion that I took my son and daughter, this year, to Omaha Beach, I pointed out the crosses there in this very quiet, reverential place--that each one of them is a story. Each one of them is a son.…”