Investor's Business Daily, May 3rd, 2007
Sacrifice: While President Bush vetoes a bad Iraq funding bill with the pen of a real hero's dad, Rep. Henry Waxman holds hearings into what happened to Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch. The contrast speaks volumes.
After an April 16 speech at the White House to which members of "Gold Star Families" were invited, President Bush met with the families of American soldiers killed in the service of their country in Iraq.
Among those he met with privately was Robert Derga of Uniontown, Ohio. Derga's son, Dustin, 24, was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005, the first Marine killed in Lima Company, with the Marine Force Reserve's 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, out of Columbus, Ohio.
Dustin was killed leading house-to-house searches in Ubaydi, Iraq, the kind of mission where death lurks behind every door.
Lima Company, a group of 160 reservists, your neighbors and ours, suffered the highest casualty rate of any company so far in the Iraq War, losing 25 Marines during their seven-month deployment.
Presidents commonly sign and veto bills with ceremonial souvenir pens, but Mr. Derga gave Bush a common everyday ballpoint 16en with a simple request: "I looked at him and said, 'Mr. President, if the Iraq supplemental comes down to a veto, I want you to use my pen to do it.' " And President Bush did.
Rep. Waxman supports the funding bill that would tell Mr. Derga his son had died in vain -- not for freedom and democracy in Iraq, not for victory in the war on terror, but in vain.
So what is Waxman concerned about?
As chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he recently held hearings looking into how and why the military "hyped" the stories of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, captured during the march to Baghdad, and Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety killed while serving with the Army Rangers in Afghanistan.
Waxman said the military "invented" tales about Lynch and Tillman. Maybe so, and maybe others higher up in the chain of command behaved less than honorably. But Lynch and Tillman did behave honorably, and neither one of them had to be there.
Tillman could have stayed in the National Football League and continued to earn millions of dollars. But he was willing to put his life on the line for his country. That he was killed by friendly fire is irrelevant to his sacrifice.
As columnist Michael Reagan has said, when you're in a war zone and you're killed, you're a hero. In our book, as well.
Yes, the military may have exploited their stories, even concealing the truth. But Waxman also is exploiting them -- to advance the Democratic agenda of retreat and defeat. He wants to exploit them to discredit the military as another argument for defunding the war.
"The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," he said.
OK, how about the truth about why you want to throw away four years of valiant sacrifice by these troops, and why you want their deaths to be in vain? Why don't you explain why you want to cut off their funding? Or why you tell them, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did, that they are a bunch of losers?
The next time you surf the Internet, do a Google search on Rafael Peralta. In the November 2004 battle for Fallujah, Marine Sgt. Peralta was shot in the head and chest at close range as his team went house to house clearing the town of jihadists.
As he lay in the floor of a terrorist hideout, Peralta saw a yellow foreign-made grenade that would have wiped out his entire squad. To save his fellow Marines, he reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked into his abdomen, where it exploded.
As Mr. Derga said after the president's speech, "We have given the ultimate sacrifice in terms of our sons, and if we can still stand in the trenches with the president and support him, why can't the rest of the nation do it?" Why not, Rep. Waxman?
Semper Fi.
