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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have come to the Senate floor before to talk about my connections with the country of Lithuania, where my mother was born. She came to the United States as an immigrant at the age of 2. It has been my good fortune to visit and revisit her homeland and to get to know the wonderful people who live in that nation.

During my time in Congress, I have tried to make sure Lithuania's heroic path to freedom, the EU, and NATO are strongly supported by their American allies in the U.S. Congress.

Now more than ever, we need to support our Baltic allies. They are critical frontline NATO partners with clear memories of Russian tyranny and a key reason the United States has troops serving in former Soviet- occupied countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

Sadly, last month, four American soldiers stationed in Lithuania died tragically while on a mission to recover a vehicle immobilized during a training exercise. I want to take a moment to tell you about these four brave men, one of whom was from my home State of Illinois, and the amazing efforts that were made to recover them.

SSG Jose Duenez, Jr., was from Joliet, IL. He, along with SSG Edvin F. Franco, PFC Dante Taitano, and SSG Troy Knutson-Collins, was part of the 1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division.

Stationed in Lithuania at a military base that I personally visited, they were called on March 25 to retrieve a tactical vehicle mired in dangerously deep mud. Sadly, these soldiers never returned. Then search efforts were initiated to locate them, and they couldn't find them.

They were in a tracked vehicle, a 70-ton tracked vehicle, and they disappeared. It took days before they finally found some tracks that led to an area, which was not very large, that looked like a puddle, but it was much more serious. The effort to find the soldiers eventually required hundreds of people from other nations. The effort was nothing short of miraculous.

The soldiers' vehicle was thought to have sunk into a muddy bog, but it was nearly impossible for the dive team to locate. They struggled to see through their masks and get enough air through their regulators. It was extremely dangerous.

It was soon clear that the mission would be one of recovery and not rescue.

Engineers were brought in to thin the concrete-like mud in an effort to drain the bog that swallowed this vehicle, but the water kept seeping in.

The recovery team grew by the hour, eventually reaching hundreds, comprised of 250 U.S. servicemembers, 160 Lithuanian soldiers and civilians, 50 Polish troops, and working canine teams from Estonia and Lithuania.

Soon, a team of U.S. Navy divers received urgent orders to fly from Spain to Lithuania to help connect cables to the sunken vehicle and pull it from the bog. It took hours of struggling through the thick sludge, but they secured the vehicle.

It was a mission fraught with extreme danger and challenges. It was met with ingenuity and a commitment to the underlying principle that every American servicemember must be brought home.

I spoke to the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States and others in Lithuania who described these days as painful days when they first tried to discover what happened to the vehicle and then an even longer period of time when they tried to retrieve the vehicle and the bodies of our soldiers.

They told me that in Lithuania, virtually every newscast focused on this tragedy. People in Lithuania felt a personal attachment to our troops, as certainly we do today. The death of these four American soldiers is a tragedy, but the joint efforts to secure them show the gravity of our commitment to our allies.

We have American troops stationed in nations like Lithuania because we have a commitment to join our NATO allies in stopping Russian aggression.

These four American soldiers lost their lives safeguarding democracy, but we owe gratitude to our Lithuanian and other allies who dropped everything and faced great odds to help us, a reminder of the common defense underlying our alliance.

On April 3, the schools were closed, the schoolchildren and their families came out and stood in the streets in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania--included in their ranks was the Lithuanian President--to pay their respects to our fallen American soldiers in their procession back to the United States.

It was a devastating episode, but it illustrated the power of international cooperation, friendship between allies, and solutions in the face of great challenges.

The loss of American servicemembers is always a tragedy. I particularly want to highlight my late constituent Sergeant Duenez. He jumped at the chance to volunteer for assignments, including the fateful mission to this bog, which he went to support even though he was not on that crew. He was a model Illinoisan and American, and he leaves behind a wife and a little boy. We should all strive to be more like Sergeant Duenez, and we owe him and his family a great debt of gratitude.

In honor of these four servicemembers, who were living examples of American values, I will be introducing a resolution recognizing their service and sacrifice to our Nation and our NATO allies. And I urge my colleagues to join me in honoring the memories of these four great soldiers and the remarkable effort that went into their recovery by passing this resolution without delay.

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