Transcriber: Laurelle Walsh Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm going to talk about a little bit different topic today.
We have listened to some truly inspired citizens.
We have listened to stories of optimism and enthusiasm.
We have listened to stories of vision.
By the way, I want to say again how great it was to see Obura up here.
When you think of a young man or a young woman
going off into the military,
and, as he said, we all have visions, and you make an impression,
but it was awfully great to see a great young man,
wearing the uniform of our military service,
standing up here talking about a vision of changing
a continent and a generation.
That's an impressive statement for the education that we provide
to our young men and women.
(Applause)
Jim Hayes talked about a great generation.
He talked about, really, your generation.
And how you really are, with your youthful enthusiasm,
and I'm sort of beyond the youthful enthusiasm point,
but you're changing the world in so many different ways.
And I want to talk about part of that great generation.
We've all probably read Tom Brokaw's book,
and we are in awe of our parents and grandparents.
My parents, and most of your grandparents,
who really took on
the weight of oppression,
of great difficult times during the Depression
to grow up a nation that really inspired the world.
We certainly have been a nation at war
truly since Iraq invaded Kuwait back in 1990.
And that hasn't slowed down,
and obviously we are involved in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
But what is interesting is that in those times
we have had something called the all-volunteer force.
We have not drafted, as they did in my generation,
young men and young women now to serve our nation.
We have asked them to serve.
We've asked them to step away from the security of their families,
we've asked them to step away from the comfort of modern conveniences,
we've asked them to go into strange places to protect the values we have as a nation.
And what's amazing to me is they've responded.
You have responded.
I can't see all the faces and hands out there,
but help me a little bit.
How many of you know someone who is serving in uniform today?
There's a bunch of hands out there.
How many of you know someone who has been to Iraq or Afghanistan?
And there's a bunch of hands out there.
Our nation is producing a generation of young men and women
who understand service to the nation.
They understand why it's important for them to step away
from their comfort level, and to go out and make a difference.
We've heard topics tonight in a broad variety of areas,
about how we can make a difference in our nation and in our world.
But these young men and women are making a difference every day
in places like Afghanistan and Iraq,
in Japan, and many other places around the world.
Young men and women wearing our uniforms
showing compassion that people, quite frankly, didn't expect.
Young men and women who also understand that there is a price to pay
for that commitment to service and our nation.
Tonight I want to talk about that special group of young men and women
who volunteer to serve our nation in our armed forces.
And particularly those who suffer terrible wounds,
and walk a very long and difficult walk
back into society and into a productive life.
Make no mistake about it,
we are the home of the free because of those brave.
Those brave young men and women who serve for us every day.
(Applause)
Now, as you heard Alex say,
I have been around the Air Force a long time.
I'm a fighter pilot by trade,
and I've had the honor, truly, to lead young men and women in combat.
While I will say that was easy,
because I was trained to do that, and I was able to adapt.
It became a very different experience for me
when my son became a member of the United States Air Force
as a flight engineer on our combat search and rescue helicopters,
whose mission is to go behind enemy lines and recover our wounded,
and bring them back to safety.
I have another son, who is currently in Botswana.
He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal,
and then, he is in Botswana now doing a pediatric rotation.
While he was in the Peace Corps,
he realized that the world needs doctors quite substantially,
and so he decided to go to med school.
So I have these two sons, one is probably more of Hick's party,
and one is probably more of George W's party,
and their mom and I are caught in between.
But when you begin to think about
the gravity of sending your son off to war,
or more importantly, you go to his mom and say, "This is going to happen,"
it adds a whole different context to the cost of freedom.
On September 11, 2001, I was the director of operations
in Tampa, Florida, at US Central Command,
and responsible for beginning the operations
in Afghanistan and then Iraq.
And so I was sending my own son into harm's way
on those early days in 2001.
I sure hoped the plan was pretty good.
Fast forward to March 2003, and we began operations in Iraq.
I sat in a video teleconference with the President,
with all of our senior military commanders.
And after the President gave his final direction
to the military forces,
he went off the air.
There were 11 three- and four-star general officers
on this video teleconference.
Eight of us were sending at least one of our children
into harm's way that night.
So the reality of committing young men and women to combat
is very personal to the leadership of your United States Armed Forces.
And, as a result, the loss of any of those,
or the wounding of any of those, is a very personal experience.
In February 2007, a young Air Force pararescueman named Scott Duffman
was killed in an aircraft crash in Afghanistan.
My son knew some of the pararescuemen that were good friends of Scott,
and asked me if I would be the senior Air Force member
at the funeral in Arlington.
I said I would certainly do that.
I happened to be working for Secretary Gates at the time,
and he was called to the White House that morning of that funeral,
and I wasn't able to attend.
Fast forward to May of 2007, and I was on the Mall in D.C.
at a ceremony honoring children
of men and women who'd fallen in combat.
I turned around, and there was a young woman standing there
with a 4- or 5-month-old daughter at the time,
and her name was Mary Duffman.
She said, "My husband was an Air Force pararescueman."
It was the young man whose funeral I was to attend.
She has become part of our family since then.
And those stories have proliferated across this nation
as young men and women serve and fall.
and more young men and women are injured, and return.
Our nation owes a debt of gratitude
certainly to each of those young men and women for their service,
and especially to their families, as they deal with the loss of a loved one,
or the long, very difficult rehabilitation of someone who is wounded.
You've heard stories of great technology tonight,
and I'm watching the time getting close, but if you think about the advancements
in rehabilitative and reconstructive technology
that we have seen today.
Today, in battlefield, if you are wounded
and you are attended to by a medic in the field,
within an hour, they can have you back into the medical system,
and you have a 97% chance of survival.
In Vietnam, that number was probably 55%.
Today we see spectacular advances
in medical technology and rehabilitative science,
and you see world-class athletes being brought back to life
in the halls of Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda,
at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio,
places where young men and women compete with each other
to return to a whole life.
That's a difficult challenge,
and it's made even more so by the fact that many come with injuries
that are not so visible.
The damage of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress syndrome
affects as many as 400,000
of our military men and women who have served.
It's a challenge that requires a commitment from society to help.
It requires a commitment from each one of us to help,
to take time to get to know those families that live in your communities.
They are active duty, they are guardsmen, they are reservists.
In many cases, that wounded warrior
is not able to maintain the bread-winner status in the family.
And so, it's a husband or a wife taking on a very new role
in a very difficult situation.
And there are some spectacular programs around our country
that help those young men and women every day;
some of them here in Colorado.
Some of them need to be started in towns close to your homes.
We talked about cycling just a moment ago.
There are two great programs called Ride to Recovery,
and The Wounded Warrior Project Soldier Ride.
The Ride to Recovery, for example, just hosted a six-day challenge ride
with wounded warriors who rode from San Antonio to Arlington, Texas.
There are projects like Healing Waters,
where a retired Navy captain, who happened to be an avid fly fisherman,
went to visit Walter Reed,
and said, "Would you all like to learn how to fly fish?"
He took wounded warriors learning to use new limbs
out onto the front lawn to teach them how to use a fly rod.
Today, Healing Waters fishing meets all over the country,
and corporate sponsors raise over 150,000 dollars a year
to provide that kind of training and support.
Here in Colorado, a program called CAMO,
Challenge Aspen Military Opportunities,
reaches out to wounded warriors, having been funded with anonymous grants,
and it offers a summer and a winter camp with therapy
through seasonal sports for each of these.
The Hartford Ski Spectacular, a Disabled Sports USA event,
has similarly brought wounded warriors out onto the snow each year.
SnoFest, as many of you may know here in Colorado,
Vail Resorts has been a great supporter.
We bring our military families up to Keystone,
and programs like Aspen Adventure
put wounded warriors on snowboards and skis for the very first time.
You can watch these young men and women
go from fear and apprehension to success and triumph.
And if you don't think they are as competitive as any Olympic athlete,
when they watch their buddy get on skis for the first time, and they fall,
they are going to get back up to be just as good as their buddy is.
These are the kinds of programs that are helping
not only with the physical rehabilitation but the mental rehabilitation.
There are some wonderful programs in art.
And art has been proven to be one of the very calming methods
to deal with post-traumatic stress.
AspenPointe is a behavioral health group
that began a wounded warrior art therapy program for soldiers at Fort Carson.
And today, at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs,
many of their pieces of art are on display.
Colorado is a place of cowboys and cowgirls,
we heard Hunter just a few minutes ago.
Equine therapy is also proven to be a spectacular way
to help calm the concerns
of a young man or a young woman recovering from PTSD.
At the Air Force Academy today,
the equestrian center has created a Warrior Wellness equine program,
to assist those with these kinds of diagnoses.
Being around the horses, being on the horses,
has proven to be great therapy.
As some of those warriors begin to transition into the civilian life,
and begin to move back into the work place,
that same program has a farrier program.
They have now trained seven wounded warriors
to become certified licensed farriers here in the state.
So there are thousands of these kinds of opportunities out there
that are all looking for your support and a place to reside in your community.
We need to help these young men and women who are trying to transition
from a very difficult time of their life into becoming not-wounded warriors.
They want to become citizens in our communities.
They need our help to do that.
So when you have the time, and you can give the effort,
first stop and say, "Hello."
Second, ask how you can help.
Look for programs like these in your community
that will allow you to touch the lives of those young men and women
who are preserving our opportunity to be at an event like we are tonight.
Our nation owes our young men and women from many generations
such a debt of gratitude.
We see a free economy, as tough as it may be sometimes,
with all the challenges that we have right now,
we see the United States as a beacon in the world for freedom,
for democracy, for market economy, for economic development.
It's these young men and women that give us that chance.
Let's give them a chance as well.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)