Department Of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURTHA. Madam Chairman, yesterday I was out at Bethesda, and I saw a young fellow that was wounded 2 years ago. And when he was wounded, his internal organs were outside the body for almost 10 days. And he's been putting up with that ever since, until he came back to Bethesda and had an operation just recently, where they were able to take the bag away that he had and restore his internal organs. That's what this bill's all about.

This Defense bill is all about taking care of the troops, making sure they have what they need. Bill Young and I work together, going to the hospital, seeing the wounded. We listen to what they say and what they need. We listen to them at the bases. We had 37 hearings this year, 51 trips that the staff made all over the country to visit the various installations to find out what the problems were.

I was out at Fort Carson where the commanding officer--and this is not something that I'm divulging, this is something that's already known--his one boy was killed in Iraq, and his other son committed suicide before he was sworn in. So he's been emphasizing how do you reduce suicides in the military. The units that came back, we've just found, have had some terrible problems with people, robberies and actually homicide, some of the actual units, at least allegedly. That's what we've seen in the newspaper.

These troops are under a tremendous strain. They're deployed too often. When I talked to the 12 troops there at Fort Carson and Fort Benning, they all told me the biggest single problem is the long deployments and the lack of time at home. And Jerry Lewis, who was chairman of the subcommittee--and Bill will tell you the same thing--when we talk to the troops, they talk about how they need more time at home. They need to spend some time at home. And even when they're home, they're training. They don't have an opportunity to visit with their families as long as they would like.

We've had hundreds of meetings with Members of Congress, hundreds of input from Members of Congress on the floor and in the committee room, trying to make sure we put a bill together that was bipartisan. We've been partners in this thing the whole way through. And we've tried to make sure--and the thrust of this bill has been for the Department to start hiring more people and getting rid of the contractors, in other words, get rid of contractors and hire people because contractors cost $44,000 more.

Well, we just find every time we turn around we find somebody at the lower level is making all kinds of changes in that policy, and we worry about it. In this bill, we have a number of things that we've done that help, not only military families, but do research for long term. We put the first money in, for instance, military pay. We raised them five tenths of a percent above the request.

First-class medical care is one of the things that we stress. Peer-reviewed research programs. $150 million for breast cancer research, $80 million for prostate cancer research, $30 million for orthopedic research. An amazing thing, the military didn't have any money in for these kinds of things until we stepped in in the subcommittee in the forefront of making sure that that gets done. $472.4 million for family advocacy programs. I could go on and on. I don't want to go too long on this debate.

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Mr. MURTHA. Let me just conclude by thanking Bill Young on all of the work he did and all of the rest of the subcommittee on the work they did.

And let me reiterate this is all about the troops being taken care of, making sure they have what they need. We put the full amount that the President requested for the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we made sure that we gave them a pay raise. And when I see those troops--whether it's in the field, at the bases, whether I see them overseas or I see the troops in the hospitals--I have such great admiration for what they do. And we're just trying to make sure they have everything that they need.

The F-22, as the gentleman from Florida says, we're going to argue that later. We would have to have 292 votes in the House; we'd have to have 66 votes in the Senate, so you can see the position I'm in and the problems that we would have if we were to go forward. I just want to make sure that the planes we have are robustly funded.

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