Every Nov. 11, our country honors those who served our country and fought to protect its values of freedom and democracy at home and abroad. However, honoring our troops means more than just a day of commemoration.
It means paying for health care when a soldier comes back wounded from battle; it means making sure veterans have a job to come back to after deployment. Lastly, it means not sending them into quagmires of conflict that cannot easily be resolved. This is especially important as we debate our re-involvement in Afghanistan and start new operations in Syria.
War is never easy, and should be avoided at any cost. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a veteran of the National Guard, there is nothing more important to me than serving those who serve us. Because of that, I have consistently said that we cannot continue to fight never-ending wars, and demanded that Congress have a robust debate any time a decision is being considered on our future military use.
Many of my colleagues have criticized President Barack Obama’s inaction in Syria before his recent deployment of Special Forces to the country. Yet, what they might not tell you is the president delivered a proposal for Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for the conflict against the Islamic State, and Congress refused to act on it. So, President Obama sent troops under a 14-year-old AUMF originally written for the war in Afghanistan.
Congress must stop forfeiting its legal and moral responsibility in debating these enormous decisions. There are 1.3 million active-duty military members in the United States who rely on us to do our job so they can do theirs.
We owe this to the nearly 1 in 10 Hawaii residents who are veterans. We owe this to the approximately 50,000 active-duty military and their families here in Hawaii. We owe this to our newest veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, with the Department of Veterans Affairs estimating that 30 percent of patients it sees from this conflict suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. We owe this to our oldest veterans, the greatest generation, who changed the face of the world so many years ago.
This Veterans Day, let us make sure that we reaffirm our commitment to these brave men and women, many of whom face new battles as they return the home front as they acclimate to civilian life. That is why I recently introduced legislation along with Congressmen Mark Takano, Chris Gibson and Mike Coffman, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal to restore GI Bill benefits to those who used them to attend for-profit colleges that closed.
Someone who makes the sacrifices they do should never feel abandoned by the country they fought so hard for.
I call on my colleagues in Congress to realize our obligation to our soldiers’ does not end after deployment; rather it is a life-long promise.
