Jim Inhofe: “if you happened to have read the current edition of U.S. News & World Report, there is a front page story about some…”

“if you happened to have read the current edition of U.S. News & World Report, there is a front page story about some very heroic people. One of those persons is from Oklahoma. Many years ago, back in 1944, when we were trying to push the Germans out of France and the Alsace-Lorraine area, it was the 761st Tank Battalion that was sent over to try to remove, to extract the Germans from that area. There is one thing that was unique about the 761st Tank Battalion. All of the soldiers in that battalion were black. They called them the ``Black Panthers.'' One of the bright young soldiers was a staff sergeant by the name of Ruben Rivers. Ruben Rivers was born in Tecumseh, OK, a very quiet, soft-spoken person, the kind who everybody liked. When he went into the service, his desire was to see combat. Back then, even though we had 1.2 million blacks serving in World War II, less than half of them saw combat, and not one of them got the Congressional Medal of Honor, in spite of the fact that they had performed all kind of heroic acts.”