During remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) spoke about the four US servicemen who died during an accident in Lithuania in March.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Mr. President, I've come to the Senate floor before to talk about my connections with the
00:04country of Lithuania, where my mother was born.
00:07She came to the United States as an immigrant at the age of two.
00:12It's been my good fortune to visit and revisit her homeland and to get to know the wonderful
00:18people who live in that nation.
00:21During my time in Congress, I've tried to make sure Lithuania's heroic path to freedom,
00:26the EU and NATO are strongly supported by their American allies and the United States Congress.
00:34Now more than ever, we need to support our Baltic allies.
00:38They are critical, front-line NATO partners with clear memories of Russian tyranny.
00:44And a key reason the United States has troops serving in the former Soviet-occupied countries
00:49like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
00:53Sadly, last month, four American soldiers stationed in Lithuania died tragically while on a mission
01:00to recover a vehicle immobilized during a training exercise.
01:05I want to take a moment to tell you about these four brave men, one of whom was from my home
01:10state of Illinois, and the amazing efforts that were made to recover them.
01:15Staff Sergeant Jose Duenas Jr. was from Joliet, Illinois.
01:20He, along with Staff Sergeant Edvin F. Franco, Private First Class Dante Teitano, and Staff Sergeant Troy Knutzen Collins,
01:31were part of the 1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, stationed in Lithuania at a military base that I have personally visited.
01:40They were called on March 25th to retrieve a tactical vehicle mired in dangerously deep mud.
01:48Sadly, these soldiers never returned.
01:52And then search efforts were initiated to locate them, and they couldn't find them.
01:57They were in a tracked vehicle, a 70-ton tracked vehicle, and they disappeared.
02:03It took days before they finally found some tracks that led to an area, which was not very large, that looked like a puddle, but it was much more serious.
02:15The effort to find the soldiers eventually required hundreds of people from other nations.
02:20The effort was nothing short of miraculous.
02:23The soldiers' vehicles was thought to have sunk into a muddy bog, but it was nearly impossible for the dive team to locate them.
02:33They struggled to see through their masts or get enough air through their regulators, but it was extremely dangerous.
02:39It was soon clear that the mission would be one of recovery and certainly not rescue.
02:44Engineers were brought in to thin the concrete-like mud in an effort to drain the bog that swallowed this vehicle, but the water kept seeping in.
02:54The recovery team grew by the hour, eventually reaching hundreds, comprised of 250 U.S. service members, 160 Lithuanian soldiers and civilians,
03:0550 Polish troops, and working K-19s from Estonia and Lithuania.
03:10Soon, a team of U.S. Navy divers received urgent orders to fly from Spain to Lithuania to help connect cables to the sunken vehicle and pull it from the bog.
03:21It took hours of struggling through the thick sludge, but they secured the vehicle.
03:26It was a mission fraught with extreme danger and challenges, and it was met with ingenuity and commitment to the underlying principle that every American service member must be brought home.
03:37Mr. President, I spoke to the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States and others in Lithuania who described these days, these painful days, when they first tried to discover what happened in the vehicle,
03:49and then an even longer period of time when they tried to retrieve the vehicle and the bodies of our soldiers.
03:55They told me that in Lithuania, virtually every newscast focused on this tragedy.
04:01The people of Lithuania felt a personal attachment to our troops and certainly we do today.
04:07The death of these four American soldiers is a tragedy, but the joint efforts to secure them show the gravity of our commitment to our allies.
04:16We have American troops stationed in nations like Lithuania because we have a commitment to join our NATO allies in stopping Russian aggression.
04:24These four American soldiers lost their lives safeguarding democracy, but we owe gratitude to our Lithuanian and other allies who dropped everything and faced great odds to help us, a reminder of the common defense underlying our alliance.
04:40On April 3rd, the schools were closed, the school children and their families came out and stood in the streets of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, including in their ranks with the Lithuanian president, to pay their respects to our former American soldiers in procession back to the United States.
04:59It was a devastating episode, but it illustrated the power of international cooperation, friendship between allies and solutions in the face of great challenge.
05:10The loss of American service members is always a tragedy.
05:14Particularly, I want to highlight my late constituent, Sergeant Duenas.
05:19He jumped at the chance to volunteer for assignments, including the fatal mission to this BOG, which he went to support even though he was not on that crew.
05:27He was a model Illinoian and American, and he leaves behind a wife and a little boy.
05:32We should all strive to be more like Sergeant Duenas, and we owe him and his family a great debt of gratitude.
05:39In honor of these four service members, who were living examples of American value, I'll be introducing a resolution recognizing their service and sacrifice to our nation and our NATO allies.
05:50I urge my colleagues to join me in honoring the memory of these four brave soldiers and the remarkable effort that went into their recovery by passing that resolution without delay.
06:00Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.