Amory Houghton: “this is a solid, basic bill--with a great purpose. It is to help honor and remember those Americans who used solid…”

“this is a solid, basic bill--with a great purpose. It is to help honor and remember those Americans who used solid, basic values to perform exceptionally and serve great purposes on behalf of our nation. Now veterans are modest people. They don't boast. They are matter-of-fact. They feel they 'did their job'. But the fact is that they did remarkable things--things that we must always remember. This project will see to that. How? Simply put, history often records the momentous events. But those momentous events are made up of countless individual storylines. Individual storylines that couldn't all fit into current history books or TV documentaries--stories that need their own archive. This bill will allow the Library of Congress to create such an archive--an archive of videotaped testimonials of the veterans themselves, telling their own stories. If those stories are not told, recorded, studied, preserved--we risk losing them, and all that they teach us. This project will seize the moment before us--before too much time has gone by--to go to our veterans and learn of duty, heroism, sacrifice, fear, humor, patriotism, comradeship, compassion . . . and of darker things and times, almost unspeakable things--and how ordinary Americans stood up to resist them. Those are lessons we must impart to the next generation. Today, we are helping to see that great purpose is served.”