Speeches & Testimony

Aloha. Three days ago, early on a beautiful clear Spring morning in Washington, DC, just as beautiful for our national’s capital as this morning is for us here in our Hawai‘i, I joined a few of my colleagues in beginning our remembrances on this Memorial Day weekend by laying a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery.

We laid our wreath at the grave of Army Infantry Sergeant John Blacknall of Virginia.  Sergeant Blacknall was born on June 6, 1912, and died on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, on his 32nd birthday. In just a few more days, we will honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a day that changed the course of that terrible war and of world history since.

But today, and tomorrow, we remember all those who, like Sergeant Blacknall, gave their lives to defend our great country and peoples throughout our generations.

This Natatorium was built as a ‘living memorial’ to honor the more than ten-thousand men and women from the Territory of Hawai‘i who served us during another far-off war now over a century ago.

Men like Chester Lee, John Davis, Charles Kanai, Eleka Kāohi, Julian Macomber and Henry Rice. They were among the crew of the merchant ship S-S Aztec. A German U-Boat sank her just off the Northwest Coast of France. They perished, along with 24 other crewmen, on April 1st, 1917. Five days later, the United States entered World War I.  And it was during that war that the Organized Militia of Hawai‘i took one a new name: the Hawai‘i National Guard.

By June 1st, 1918, the Guard had deployed 5,500 troops to fight in World War I.  All told, we would lost more than one hundred or our own in that conflict.

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of visiting the direct descendants of those early Guardsmen, our Hawai‘i Army National Guard troops deployed overseas.  I visited our 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team stationed at Camp Bondsteel, the ‘Lava Strong’, Colonel Roy Macaraeg commanding, near the capital of Pristina, on peacekeeping in the European country of Kosovo.

And I visited the 299th Calvary, the ‘Koa Regiment’, Colonel John Udani commanding, on guard as part of a multi-national force and observers also keeping the peace, based in Sharm El-Sheik in Egypt, but also operating from bases in the Northern Sinai, and in more remote locations.

These troops, like the generations before them, have answered the call to defend the values that all men and women cherish – freedom, democracy and the right to live in peace, often in strange, faraway places.

Places with different names than ours – like the Ardennes, Coral Sea, Incheon, Khe Sanh, and Fallujah. And they also understand that defending those values means that they might not return.

Let us then take this brief moment to remember those, like Sergeant Blacknall, and those on this Memorial before us, who gave their futures, for ours. And to keep in our thoughts and prayers all the men and women who serve us today, here and around the world.

Aloha, and Mahalo.