Words that ring from VFW hall to Senate floor
Source: Providence Journal
May 25, 2008
U.S. Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse took the words of Col. Edward Cyr onto the floor of
the Senate Thursday night. It was just one of those moments, he said. “I
don’t think I can explain it, and, frankly, I don’t even want to try,
because if I tried to explain it I’d just make it smaller,” said the
senator, according to a transcript sent from his office on Friday. “So
all I want to say is, as we leave this glorious chamber to go home to
our states to celebrate this Memorial Day weekend; for all the Edward
Cyrs, and for all the Patricia Cyrs across this country, thank-you and
God bless you.” Whitehouse met Cyr at his community dinner at
the VFW hall in Bristol last weekend. Cyr is a nurse anesthetist who
lives in Bristol and works at St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River. He has
served more than 30 years in the Army Reserve, with two tours in Iraq
and one in Kosovo. He had gone to the dinner to ask for what he sees as
a small reward for the good service of tens of thousands of people. In
the process, he revealed just a little bit of what it means for a
husband and father to go to war. “I’m a colonel,” said Cyr as we spoke by phone on Friday. “I have to speak.” So he pointed out to Whitehouse what he considers the unfairness of a
provision in the 2008 Defense Authorization bill that gives Reserve and
National Guard members three months of retirement eligibility for every
three months served on active duty. The problem, says Cyr, is that the
effective date of the legislation is its date of passage this year.
That means that those who served from 2001 till now would not be
eligible. Cyr points out that Rhode Island has one of the
highest, if not the highest, rate of return deployments to Iraq and
Afghanistan among its Guard and Reserve units. “I took care of these men and women,” he said. “Their blood was under my fingernails, in my boots.” He believes, strongly, that the service and the sacrifice deserve this small consideration in retirement eligibility. “Once you send people to war, you need to support them,” he said. Whitehouse agreed to try to make the effective date of the bill retroactive to Sept. 11, 2001. But that is not what moved the senator to bring the colonel into the
business of the Senate. That came when Whitehouse asked Cyr about the
strain of multiple deployments. “I said ‘Colonel, if I may ask a personal question, what was your family situation through all of this?’ ” Cyr told Whitehouse he was glad the senator had asked the question because his wife, Patricia, was sitting right beside him. “And
he proudly pointed her out,” Whitehouse recalled, “and he said this:
‘For all those months, over three tours, she had to go it alone,
raising my five daughters. I want to take this chance to thank her,
because if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have had a home to come home
to.’ ” There was not a sound nor a dry eye in the house when Cyr finished speaking, said Whitehouse. Then there was applause. It really was one of those moments, filled with spontaneous feeling. It spoke of the service of those who stay home. Cyr has seen some things during those deployments to field hospitals
close to the fighting. He has seen vicious burns, massive blood loss
and people who can’t be saved. He has seen 15 Iraqi kids who were
playing soccer one moment and being wheeled into his hospital the next.
A bomb had exploded in their midst. It would be difficult,
maybe impossible, to deal with it all if he did not know his wife was
back in Bristol, doing the amazing things she does. “She kept
the family together,” he said. “She allowed me to go to war. I’ve
missed graduations, proms, all kinds of things. We’re good teammates.” There have been times when he is home after a deployment when his wife
will tell him what a good day was like when he was away. A good day,
she said, was a day when no men in uniform pulled up to the house in an
Army car and walked to the front door. Cyr said he learned on
Thursday that Whitehouse planned to take his words from the VFW hall
onto the floor of the Senate. It’s very nice, he said. “But I’ve got five daughters and a wife. I’ve got things to do.