As families across western Wisconsin celebrate Memorial Day, it is important to reflect on the sacrifices our nation’s veterans have made, including the 21 service members from the district who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I commend our service members and their families for the contributions they have made to better secure our country. We owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.   

In addition to attending most of the company deployments throughout western Wisconsin, I also attended the 32nd Brigade deployment ceremony in Madison this past February, one of the largest since World War II.  With our country involved in two conflicts overseas, these deployments exemplify the need to support our troops in the field and after they return home.
 
Just this week, I introduced the Service Members Home Ownership Act with my colleague from Wisconsin, Steve Kagen.  For members of our armed forces who are serving outside the country in 2009, this legislation extends the first-time homebuyer credit - a $8,000 tax credit available to anyone who purchases his or her first home – for an additional year.  Service members should not lose the opportunity to use this tax credit because they are serving our nation overseas.

Our soldiers and veterans also deserve a first-class education at a fair and affordable price.  That’s why I also introduced the Help Student Soldiers Act, which forgives federal students loans for the semester in which students must withdraw from college and do not receive academic credit, due to a call to active duty service.  By lessening the financial strain and distractions of deployment, service members will be more able to focus on their unit’s mission.  I also want to urge our veterans in to take advantage of the 21st Century GI Bill which gives members of the military who have served on active duty since September 11, 2001 up to four academic years of education benefits, including stipends for housing and books.  This program is modeled after the GI Bill following World War II, which helped numerous veterans to develop the skills to build our great nation.

Finally, there is no better way to honor our veteran’s service than by recording their memories.  To help us commemorate and preserve our veteran’s service, I created the Veteran’s History Project. The project uses volunteer interviews to tape record the stories of our veterans.  A copy of the tape can be sent to the Library of Congress, where it will be included in our nation’s collection.  These living testaments help preserve an important part of American history: what it was like to serve our nation.  Although the project has collected more than 60,000 individual stories to date, the world’s largest oral history collection, there are still millions of stories that can be told.  I urge you to take the time on Memorial Day to not only thank our veterans and remember our country’s fallen soldiers, but also to ask the veterans in your life to record their stories.   They serve as the most significant memorial we can possibly give to our nation’s fallen and living veterans.