Garcia, Miller-Meeks, & Ellzey Discuss Their Own Military Service & the Importance of Supporting Our Troops
WASHINGTON, DC – With Memorial Day approaching, The Ripon Society held a dinner discussion this past Monday evening with three Members of Congress who served in the military prior to their election and were invited to discuss not only the importance of taking care of our troops, but how their service in uniform shapes their service on Capitol Hill today.
The Members were: U.S. Rep. Mike Garcia, who served nearly 20 years as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy and now represents the 27th District of California in the House; U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who served 24 years as a nurse and doctor in the Army and now represents the 1st District of Iowa; and, U.S. Rep. Jake Ellzey, who served 20 years as a fighter pilot and helicopter pilot in the Navy and now represents the 6th District of Texas.
Garcia kicked off the discussion by talking about some of the pressing challenges facing America and how his time in uniform compares to his job on Capitol Hill.
“What we’re doing today is just as important as the missions that we flew over Iraq,” he stated. “We are literally in the process of trying to save this country despite some of the headwinds that we’ve got from the Executive Branch. In the end, for me, this isn’t about the parties. This isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats. This is about the Constitution. This is about prolonging this beautiful experiment that we call the United States of America with an oath to defend it just like we did while we were in uniform.”
First elected to the House in a May 2020 special election, Garcia added that one of the ways to prolong and protect that experiment is by protecting and taking care of the men and women who keep us free.
“We have to double down on our commitment to our active-duty soldiers as well as our veterans,” the California lawmaker said. “Right now — with all the swirl, chaos and drama that’s going on and these massive budgets that we’re looking at — we can’t forget that it comes down to that soldier who’s making $22,000 a year. Most Americans don’t realize our troops start at $22,000 a year when they enlist in the military. We’ve got a lot of work to do to take care of them, but we’ve got good folks here on the ground doing that.”
Miller-Meeks agreed and opened her remarks by talking about her own time in uniform, and how, in her family, serving in the military has deep roots.
“Serving in the military has been an honor for me,” she stated. “It’s a real privilege. My Dad enlisted in the Air Force, so he was career military. My Mom was a military spouse, had a GED. Both my parents worked. I don’t remember a time when they did not work. We traveled from military base to military base, always ping ponging back to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.”
Noting she had brothers and sisters who also served in the military and her grandparents and uncle served in World War II, as well, she added:
“I think service is what’s most important. And I think we serve in a variety of ways, whether it’s in the military or not. But I would say that there’s not a time that doesn’t go by that I do not acknowledge and know that I’m here because of the service of those, such as Jake and Mike beside me, who are willing to defend our freedoms. It’s a very monumental task. And I’ll echo Mike in saying that we need to do what we can to support our military. I don’t believe they’re supported well right now by people at the highest echelons of command. And they need the support that we can give them.”
Ellzey concurred, and kicked off his remarks by talking about the tough votes he has taken as a Member of Congress, and how this experience pales in comparison to some of the things he saw and did while serving in Iraq.
“There are no hard votes because the three of us have seen things and participated in things that are hard,” he stated. “We have lost friends. On our last day in Iraq, we lost this young man, Clark Schwedler, in April of 2007. And then 16 years later, the other guy who was wounded in that operation committed suicide. That was just a month and a half ago. We know what that sacrifice is. There are no hard votes. There are just hard explanations.”
Making reference to the current debate over raising the debt limit and some of the charges being levied by some on the other side of the political aisle, Ellzey continued:
“We’ll see what happens over the next few days. But the threats are out there in ways that we haven’t witnessed in probably 80 years. And the other side is concentrating on things that are not applicable to the national security of the United States. So it’s important that we get these things right. Moreover, as we deal with veteran issues … I think it’s remarkable and I think somewhat sad that the other side is trying to out-veteran us, which I never thought I’d see.”
“We’re doing everything we can for our veterans. The VA has nearly doubled in size in the last five years. And so they’re going to put us in some positions that make us sound like we’re anti-veteran, which I think is extremely cynical. I don’t like having people use my veteran brothers and sisters as a wedge. I think you might see some of that. But we’ve got important work to do, and none of us need this. We’re called to do it. And that’s how all three of us conduct ourselves all the time. And that’s why I’m so proud to sit up here with these two wonderful people.”
Following their remarks, the three lawmakers took a number of questions, including one about the mental health challenges many veterans face when they leave the battlefield and what Congress can do to help them when they return home.
“It used to be a stigma if you had a mental health challenge or suicidal thoughts or PTSD,” Garcia stated. “As veterans, we don’t like to talk about it. What we need to do as a culture is actually extract some of those conversations, but not from a bureaucrat, not from a politician, or not someone who hasn’t been there. The most valuable asset to a veteran in need is another veteran who has seen – who’s been there and been through it.”
“In an ideal world, the VA would also be there to give us that assistance and help with the therapy, help with whatever treatments are available for the challenges. But 20 years of the Global War on Terror is a lot. There are folks who have done six to eight rotations, into true combat, low-intensity conflict, but true combat operations where people are dying around them and they’re killing people. It is impossible for that to not take a toll on you mentally. If we can’t as a culture talk about it, if veterans can’t reach out and give that sort of asset to other veterans as therapists themselves, and if the VA can’t step up and start treating folks, then this is going to be a multi-generational problem.”
Miller-Meeks expressed similar concerns.
“The VA wants all care to be within the VA hospital system,” she remarked. “I don’t give a damn where you live. If you’re a veteran, you get care where you are because you go back to a community. And I’m just so tired of the excuses. We did a bill that said mental health and substance use disorder are part of the Mission Act because the VA doesn’t consider that, and that those individuals have to be seen within 10 days. Why did we do it? To force the VA to do the right thing.”
The key thing, she added, is making sure military families have the support they need.
“It is so important when you’re deployed six times or eight times or nine times that you know that your family is there,” the Iowa Republican stated. “We’re really putting a huge burden on family members and spouses and children when we’re deploying individuals that often. So how do we support that military family? How do we support that husband or wife to be faithful to take care of the family, to communicate when their loved one is away, so that those family units are going to be critically important, and then how do we support them to navigate through PTSD?”
For Ellzey, the other question is how to deal with a system that essentially takes America’s best and brightest and trains them to do “the worst.”
“One of my favorite things is to appoint Academy students,” he said. “They’re the best and the brightest of us with the biggest servants’ hearts and are usually involved in their church. They’re wonderful people. The people who enlist are very much the same. We train them very well and what do we send them to do? Over the course of two conflicts over 20 years, taking a human life is the worst thing another human being can do. And we’re asking the best of us to do it.
“For some, the bill must be paid sooner rather than later. For others, it takes 16 years like it did for my friend. But that bill must be paid, and the toll is on them. So if you come home and you try to find people who are going to have any concept of what it’s like to either take another life or watch somebody else take it, you can’t. So the peer-to-peer counseling is extremely important, especially as we’re aging out or especially as our Special Operators are now turning 50 like me. All they’ve ever done is shoot. So now they’re 50-years old, their bodies are broken, their families are probably broken, and now they can’t get hired even as contractors to pull the trigger. There are younger people to do that.
“That’s why you’re seeing a lot of Special Operators taking their own lives right now. There are no peers to take care of them. And some of them are just freaking lost. That’s why a few of them will also tell you that some of the experimental — for lack of a better term – therapies and medicines are coming under wider use and wider acceptance. But peer counseling is extremely important, and the tidal wave is just now starting with 22 suicides a day.”
The three lawmakers were also asked about the importance of helping service men and women start new careers after they leave uniform, and what can be done to encourage more companies and private sector employers to establish programs like Disney’s “Heroes Work Here” initiative that aims to help veterans transition to civilian life.
“Some of the most tremendous assets in any workforce, pretty much in any industry, are veterans,” Garcia observed. “But the ironic and almost cruel part of it is that most veterans, when they come out of the military, think they have no transferable skill sets … What we find is that with companies that do hire veterans and prioritize and actually put quotas in place to hire veterans, they become some of the most valuable players on those teams. That begets cultural changes, which beget other successes. So that’s something that we need to encourage more businesses to do.
Miller-Meeks concurred.
“One of the things that’s difficult in coming out of the military,” she said, “is many veterans don’t know what their value is outside of the military or what their skillset is. And that is why we in the civilian world need to make those connections for them. It was incredibly difficult to get the licensing boards to acknowledge veterans education. You can go to a school, get training in the military, and then because that’s not at some college somewhere, it’s not considered education. Linking that education and that training you get in the military to what you would have in a civilian education is critically important.”
According to Ellzey, the reentry process from the military to civilian life for veterans is simply nonexistent.
“I think it’s the fault of the DOD,” he said bluntly. “The DOD needs to, before they release any active-duty military member, have the disability rating taken care of, the licensure stuff taken care of, so that they can land on their feet in the civilian world before they find themselves in a dead-end job with psychological and perhaps self-medicine problems. And our goal is to some point get to that. I think that’s absolutely essential going forward to take care of our veterans.”
To close out the discussion, the lawmakers were asked about the number of veterans currently serving in Congress and the importance of having veterans’ perspective on Capitol Hill.
“We are at a record low percentage of veterans in Congress right now,” Garcia noted. “When you look back over our nation’s history, it ranged anywhere from 35 percent to upwards of 55 percent on the heels of World War II. We’re down to like 17 percent right now.
“And I would submit the big causal factor for the dysfunction in Congress right now in DC at large is because we have a record low percentage of veterans in the halls, people who care about the country more than their party. And there are just not too many of us right now. We need to inspire more to run for political office or enter public service. I don’t care if it’s Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the military, or Congress. We’ve got to serve this beautiful country before we can expect it to serve us correctly.”
To view the remarks of Garcia, Miller-Meeks, and Ellzey at yesterday’s breakfast discussion, please click the link below:
The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.