Effects of Troop Deployments

Floor Speech

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Thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. And first I want to say thank you personally for everything you have done for this institution and for this Nation. The kind of leadership you are showing tonight has been shown over and over throughout your 3 1/2 years in the Congress, and I look forward to that kind of leadership in the future.

I want to say a few things about posttraumatic stress. The marital problems diagram that we saw earlier is a shocking example of the kind of thing that we are seeing throughout society as a result of this conflict. It turns out that about one in five of our soldiers that returns from Iraq is suffering from a serious form of posttraumatic stress. And that correlates very well with the numbers we are seeing in the graph: About 20 percent of divorce in the current year, 27 percent of other problems, 15 percent of infidelity. So we know that those numbers are about right. And this is exacerbated by having extended tours, by staying there longer than 12 months, and by going back repeatedly. And we know now that only about half of the servicemembers who are suffering from posttraumatic stress and veterans are receiving the right kind of treatment or are receiving any kind of treatment or have sought treatment.

We know that only about half of those that are looking for treatment are getting the kind of treatment they need. So only about 5 percent of the veterans really are getting the kind of treatment that they need on that.

We really do owe the veterans of the country that have served, that have volunteered in this day and age to serve our country, to go to a conflict region, knowing that their lives are in danger, that they could end up with post-traumatic stress, that it is going to be harmful on their families, nonetheless they volunteered to serve our country, to protect our freedom and fight for us back home. No matter how you feel about the war and any of those political issues, we should all agree that we owe our veterans for what they have done for our country.

You are finding throughout this Congress, the 110th Congress, that we have made a collective decision to do what we can for the veterans. We have increased the VA budget by $8 billion over the previous year. And that is significant. That is great, but we still need to do a lot more, and we are moving in that direction.

Today in the Veterans' Affairs Committee we had some bills on the GI bill for the 21st century which are an extension of the Montgomery GI bill, a terrific advancement to give our veterans the kind of education that they need to be productive members of our society.

That money is very, very well spent. I have heard oftentimes that for every dollar we invest in education for our veterans, we get paid back ten-fold. You can see that as a true indication of what happened after World War II. The veterans came back from World War II, and they were given a terrific GI bill, and they have contributed to our society in so many ways in terms of developing our infrastructure, in terms of raising our national stature. And we want to make sure that the veterans coming back from Iraq today have those same opportunities to contribute in other ways than just participating in the war.

With regard to the Iraq war, a specific type of injury is the hallmark or signature of this war, that is the traumatic brain injury. Before in earlier conflicts those kind of injuries, a serious form of traumatic brain injury resulted in death. Today they know how to treat that injury. I will give you sort of a graphic explanation. If that is going to be offensive, you better turn off the sound for a little while.

Basically in a serious form of traumatic brain injury, you get a bullet or shrapnel lodged in the brain, and what happens is your brain begins to swell from the injury. And so unless that swelling is dealt with very soon after the injury, the subject will die. So what they do in the field now is they open up a large section of your skull. They remove the skull itself and embed that into your GI territory to keep that skull viable so it can be reattached later on. In this situation the brain is allowed to swell, and they will have this proceed for about a month. During that time they need to put you in a cold surrounding. They put a cold jacket on you so you are shivering in your bed for about a month. They keep you on medication to keep the swelling down. When the swelling eventually goes down, they will reattach the skull and let you heal.

Another problem is when you have this sort of injury, you are very susceptible to reinjure that, to swell it after they have removed the shrapnel if they can or the bullet. You are very susceptible, so you have to be very careful a year or longer after this kind of injury.

We had a young man from my district, from the town of Manteca. It is a small town of about 60,000 people. He was a Navy corpsman and he was serving in Iraq and their convoy was attacked. He was servicing marines that were injured, and a piece of shrapnel was embedded into his brain. It went in through his eye and he lost his eye. He went through the treatment, and then they brought him back to Bethesda, Maryland. I visited him there a couple of times. This is a very long recovery. The young man is doing fine. He is back home now.

I can tell you the town of Manteca where he grew up and lived and went to church really came together for him. They had a dinner when he was still in Bethesda. About 300 people came out to the dinner to contribute and to show their support for this young man. It was a terrific outpouring of community and faith and love. It was a terrific thing to be representing this kind of town and this kind of a district where people come together in that sort of way for one of their own.

And then when he did come home, the church that he went to, they had a gathering. About a thousand people showed up, and he was there receiving accolades and welcome and love from the entire community. I can tell you, it is a terrible thing to see. Unfortunately, a lot of our young men and women who come back from Iraq don't have that strong of a community. We need to make sure that we provide them, through treatments and efforts to integrate them back into society, to educate them, that they get that sort of opportunity and that they receive the kind of reward that they should for the kind of service and sacrifice that they have made.

With that, I yield back to Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and thank you for your leadership.

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Thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

Mr. Speaker, we've heard a lot of different aspects of the stress of this war on our soldiers, from the families and the children, to the men and women serving.

One thing we haven't talked about is financial stress, and we know that veterans, especially guardsmen and women and reservists when they go overseas, they're particularly vulnerable to foreclosure; and just today in the Veteran's Affairs Committee, we did pass a significant Veterans Housing Authority bill that will be available to those young men and women coming up in the next month or two.

So we're working at all parts of this problem and finding ways to help the veterans through the crises that they're going to be facing upon return, and we welcome them back. This country loves our veterans, and we want to do everything we can for them

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