Wounded Warrior Assistance Act of 2007

Floor Speech

WOUNDED WARRIOR ASSISTANCE ACT OF 2007

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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to add my voice to the eloquent voice of the chairman, Mr. Skelton. I want to thank him, and thank also Dr. SNYDER and JOHN MCHUGH, the chairman and ranking member of Personnel, for their hard work on this bill. And for all the other Members who worked on this, I know Mr. Filner and Mr. Buyer were also architects of this bill. But especially our chairman, who has a heart for the military and perhaps is the most adept custodian of the history of military personnel matters in the Armed Services Committee; a guy with a great eye and ear for history and for the sense of tradition that kind of brings us together on the Armed Services Committee to find common ground on important issues to the folks that wear the uniform. This is one of those issues, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, young people right now are serving this country in far away places like Ramadi and Fallujah and Mosul and Kabul, and many other places around the world where the war against terror brings them face to face with danger every day. Some of those, the great members of the U.S. military, give their last full measure of devotion. Some of them are wounded and come back through Landstuhl and then to Bethesda and Walter Reed.

And, Mr. Chairman, I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's speech in 1981, when he stood on the west steps of the Capitol and he gestured out to the west and he said, There's the Washington Monument, dedicated to the Father of our Country, and beyond that, the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated to the man who saved the Union. But beyond those monuments are thousands of monuments with crosses and Stars of David, dedicated to Americans who gave that full measure of devotion to the same degree that the Founding Fathers did, and that's Arlington Cemetery.

And he mentioned that under one of those markers lies a man named Martin Trepto, who was killed in World War I. He had gone to fight with the Rainbow Division in France, and after a few months or a few weeks in country, he was killed. When his friends found his body, they found that he kept a diary, and he had written these words, and I am paraphrasing: I must fight this war as if the success or failure of America depends on me alone.

I can tell you, Mr. Chairman, in going out to the warfighting theaters, that standard is the same standard that is carried by the young men and women of America's Armed Forces. And because of that, it is all the more compelling that we do everything possible to make sure that they have good care when they come home, and when they are wounded and when their families similarly are wounded by their wounds; and to make sure that we have a government which is friendly to them.

A lot of this problem at Walter Reed and Bethesda and the rest of our medical care apparatus is this; we need to have a system that is friendly, friendly to that 22-year-old marine wife who drives a couple hundred miles, maybe leaves the kids with the mother-in-law while she goes with her husband to undertake therapy at one of our hospitals. To be able to get in and get out without having to get bogged down in a mass of bureaucracy. It is toward those ends that we dedicated this bill.

And again, I think the chairman has done a great job, as have Mr. McHugh and Mr. Snyder. And let me tell you a couple of the highlights here.

I like the idea that you have got a limitation on 17 cases per case manager. That means that each case manager is going to have a lot of time to spend with each case, with each individual. And you also have the family advocate who will help with housing and transportation and all those things. That is almost as important as the case manager, because that helps a family to be with their loved one while they are undertaking their treatment.

I also like this handoff between the VA and DoD. We now have a physical meeting where you don't have the bureaucracy finally telling us after 3, 4 or 5 months that the records have been lost, that they have been misplaced or that there are some missing. And lastly, when we do the evaluation, to have experts who will assist the servicemember in making sure that his or her file is complete when they go for disability. That means if you've got that frag wound in your left leg, you make sure that you've got a record of that in that disability packet when you go before the board.

Now, there are lots of other good language in this bill and good provisions in this bill that will accrue to the benefit of the servicemember and their family, but I think those are especially important.

Lastly, I think the hotline is important, Mr. Chairman, where people can call in and let the system know that it's messed up and that it's not serving them well. And I know that the wonderful men and women who serve our U.S. military will respond to that and will make things right.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for letting me speak for a couple of minutes about this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. HUNTER. I just want to take a second, Mr. Chairman, to thank the gentleman who just spoke as one of the finest members of our committee and to point out, too, and he went over a number of the high points in this bill, and this idea of having an independent medical officer who helps the service personnel, making sure that they have got in their files when they go before that evaluation board, making sure they have got that record of that shrapnel wound to the calf or to the side, that in cases in times past you would have service personnel who were highly frustrated because they have been wounded, they knew where the wounds were, and yet somehow the paperwork had disappeared. So having that professional to help prepare it is very, very important; and I thank the gentleman for his great service and work on putting this thing together.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of our time.

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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to mention that in 2005, and working with Mr. Buyer and working with Mr. Skelton and other Members of the Armed Services Committee and Veterans' Affairs Committee, we put together this Disability Claims Commission with an eye toward trying to make the evaluations that are arrived at in DOD and the VA system consistent. In this bill that we are passing today, we are directing DOD and VA to go back and, as this commission meets and continues to work, to focus on their work product and what they are doing; and, hopefully, we can have some value added as a result of their focusing on the commission that currently is in place.

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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I just want to say that I think this is an excellent amendment from our side. I want to thank the gentleman for offering it, and we have absolutely no objections to this amendment. We support it very strongly. Good work.

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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to thank the gentleman for yielding. And, you know, the Marine motto is ``Always Faithful,'' and once again, the gentleman, who is a great former marine, is being always faithful, not just to the men and women of his service, the Marine Corps, but those of all services who have been wounded in the war against terror. I want to thank the gentleman. I support this amendment very strongly.

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