Mr. Speaker, just a few hours ago, I heard moving testimonials about the impact of the Iraq war on real people, real families and real communities, both American and Iraqi. I organized a forum precisely to get beyond the statistics, the strategy, and the abstractions, to understand the devastating human cost of this war.

We heard from Charlie Anderson, a former marine who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and now is a regional coordinator for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He spoke of the Government of the United States having failed the men and women it sent to war.

He said, ``I was completely untrained and unprepared for what I experienced in Iraq.''

He told us, ``In the 7 years preceding my deployment to the Middle East ..... I had not set foot in the desert or had any training on how to fight or survive there. I had fired my 9-millimeter service pistol exactly once.''

And this is the part that blew my mind, Mr. Speaker: Mr. Anderson added that after firing his weapon during one ambush, he said, ``I was told I would not be issued replacement ammunition because there was none to be had. My platoon sergeant told me `do not shoot unless your death is imminent .....' ''

Can you imagine that? The mighty United States military, the greatest fighting force in the world, essentially rationing bullets?

Dahlia Wasfi, a doctor who is half Jewish and half Iraqi, offered a powerful historical analogy. She spoke of her mother's relatives being driven from their native Austria to avoid Nazi concentration camps. ``Never again'' is the refrain we use when talking about the Holocaust. She then spoke of her father's relatives who are ``not living, but dying, under the occupation of this administration's deadly foray in Iraq.''

She went on: ``From the lack of security to the lack of basic supplies to the lack of electricity to the lack of potable water to the lack of jobs to the lack of reconstruction to the lack of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, they are worse off now than before we invaded. `Never again' should apply to them, too.''

An Iraqi civil engineer named Faiza also spoke to us. She fled occupied Iraq last summer after her son, a student, was detained for several days by the Ministry of the Interior without any charges being filed.

``He has a beard; so he was a suspect terrorist,'' she said.

Although they said he had committed no crimes, his family had to pay thousands of dollars to secure his release. How is that for the transformation of power to freedom?

Now she and her family are living as exiles in Jordan, driven away from everything that was once familiar to them. But the only other choice was to live in a country whose infrastructure has been completely torn down and never rebuilt.

Mr. Speaker, in the name of these three brave souls, for the sake of human decency if nothing else, it is time to end this war, bring our troops home, and give Iraq back to the Iraqi people.