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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 70 (Monday, May 1, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E890-E892]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                         EXEMPLARY VA EMPLOYEES

                                 ______

                      HON. G.V. (SONNY) MONTGOMERY

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, May 1, 1995
  Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Speaker, our human vocabulary does not contain 
the words to accurately describe the horror, the sadness, the profound 
feelings of grief and loss we have all experienced since the April 19th 
bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. This monstrous act--
targeted at our young innocents, at the elderly seeking their Social 
Security benefits, at disabled veterans checking on their vocational 
rehabilitation or compensation benefits, at the hundreds of Federal 
employees laboring conscientiously to serve their fellow citizens--
epitomized man's inhumanity to man. In response, we want to reach out 
to the injured and to the families of those who are missing or dead, 
and speak the words that will relieve their suffering. Knowing this is 
impossible we nonetheless struggle to share with these blameless 
victims our concern for them and the pain we feel on their behalf.
  In contrast to the ugliness of the bombing, countless men and women 
in Oklahoma City epitomize, by their selfless heroism, courage, valor, 
and determination, the deep concern most of us feel for one another in 
this country. I am particularly proud of the extraordinary response of 
the Department of Veterans' Affairs [VA] employees in Oklahoma City. 
Most of you read in the April 23, 1995, edition of the Washington Post 
the remarkable account of the brave actions of the VA staff who were in 
the Federal Building at the time of the explosion. I will not soon 
forget the description of Paul Heath, a VA counseling psychologist, 
who, having escaped the collapsed building, returned to his ruined 
office with a stretcher to rescue his badly-injured colleague. For the 
benefit of my colleagues who did not have an opportunity to read the 
Post article, a copy follows:
                 [The Washington Post, April 23, 1995]

Pelted With Glass, Buried by Walls, This Office of Eight Pulled Through

                           (By William Booth)

       Oklahoma City.--They began an extraordinary day as the most 
     ordinary of people.
       On Wednesday morning at 9, they sat at their computers or 
     leaned on their desks in the Department of Veterans Affairs' 
     small office on the fifth floor of the Alfred P. Murrah 
     Federal Building. There were eight of them that morning, 
     people similar to hundreds of thousands of federal employees 
     across the nation.
       ``Just the most normal day,'' rehabilitation specialist 
     Diane Dooley would recall later. ``That's how the day 
     started, just the same old, same old.''
       But not for long. In the time it might have taken to 
     retrieve a file, the office was ripped in half by a massive 
     explosion from a car bomb set off just outside the building's 
     front entrance. Those inside were buried by an avalanche of 
     debris or swept away in a blast of flying glass.
       In the torrent, they lost fingers and eyes and ears. Their 
     bones were broken and twisted. Some even lost their sense of 
     where and who they were, becoming white ghosts covered in 
     dust and blood, wandering in shock through a building filled 
     with the dead.
       Later, at least one of them would wonder why he was not 
     more brave; another would claim they were not heroes. All of 
     them wept. But all of them survived the bomb that went off at 
     9:04 a.m.
       ``We were so lucky,'' said Jim Guthrie. ``I know if things 
     had just been a little bit different, that we could all be 
     buried out there in the rubble.''
       The VA office was not unlike the 14 other agencies' offices 
     in the building. Each was filled with bureaucrats, 
     secretaries, clients--perhaps 800 people in all that morning, 
     now grimly divided between the survivors and the dead. 
     Although its occupants were more fortunate than many others, 
     the story of the VA office is in many ways the story of them 
     all.
       The eight VA employees pushed papers but they also pushed 
     disabled veterans, helping them get jobs and benefits. They 
     thought of themselves as a family: They told jokes, they made 
     calls, and they filled file cabinets with stories of veterans 
     getting ahead in life or spiraling ever downward. Of the 
     eight workers, five were veterans themselves.
       They called themselves by alphabet letters, as federal 
     employees so often do--CPs and VRSs and LVERs: Counseling 
     Psychologists and Veteran Rehabilitation Specialists and 
     Local Veteran Employment Representatives. On Wednesday 
     morning, they were discussing their QRs, or Quality Reviews. 
     They were busy, one recalled without irony, ``reinventing 
     government.''

[[Page E891]]

       Guthrie, a contracting officer's representative, stopped by 
     the office to work on securing a dental contract for disabled 
     veterans in nearby Lawton. He considers himself a hard worker 
     and a trouble-shooter, who does all the ``crappy little 
     jobs'' that need doing. Long and lean, divorced with kids and 
     living in nearby Muskogee, where the central office is 
     located, Guthrie, 44, is a former Marine, who spent 13 months 
     ducking rockets in Da Nang, Vietnam, an experience he does 
     not dwell on. ``I don't like pity parties,'' he says.
       The explosion, he said, was worse than anything that 
     happened to him in Vietnam.
       When Guthrie arrived at the office, he greeted everyone. He 
     remembers that Stan Ronbaun, who worked for the state but was 
     attached to the federal office to help find jobs for disabled 
     veterans, was sitting at his desk right next to the window. 
     Ronbaun was from New York and liked jokes. He reminded people 
     of the actor Walter Matthau.
       Martin Cash, too, was in the front room, almost as exposed 
     as Ronbaun to the large plate-glass windows on the north face 
     of the building. Cash counseled veterans about their 
     benefits. Nearby were John Colvin and George Denker. They 
     helped disabled vets get loans.
       Guthrie visited for a few minutes with Diane Dooley and 
     office coordinator Paul Heath, a man who wears many hats. 
     Heath is a psychological counselor for veterans, helping them 
     through neurological disease or divorce or alcoholism. He has 
     been with the VA in this office for 28 years. People call him 
     ``Doc.''
       The three of them--Guthrie, Dooley and Heath--talked about 
     ``nothing unusual.'' Heath recalls, ``something about putting 
     together a unified database for a vocational rehab unit.''
       Daughter of a retired Air Force sergeant, Dooley married 
     the son of another Air Force sergeant. She started working 
     for the VA five years ago as a clerk-typist and put herself 
     through college, becoming what she jokingly calls ``a social 
     worker for veterans.'' Just as she was getting up to go to 
     the Federal Employee Credit Union, she got a call from Dennis 
     Jackson, her co-worker, ringing her from his cellular phone, 
     telling her he was running late.
       At 9:00, running late herself because of Jackson's call, 
     Dooley started for the stairwell to descend to the credit 
     union on the third floor. She never made it. She was lucky. 
     Seventeen of the 31 employees at the credit union are 
     believed dead.
       ``Just as my hand reached the door, the explosion, it went 
     off,'' Dooley said, relating the story from her flower-filled 
     bedroom after being released Friday from St. Anthony's 
     Hospital. ``I though I had set it off. Honest to God, I 
     believed I triggered the bomb.''
       Dooley was knocked on her back, her right hand and wrist 
     smashed, her toes broken. She believes she heard a second 
     explosion, which may have been the device itself or the front 
     of the building collapsing. ``I could hear a man, somewhere, 
     saying, `Help me, help me.'''
       Dooley stumbled down another two flights and staggered from 
     the building. A man kept asking: ``What's your name? What's 
     your name?''
       She was bundled into a police cruiser and is believed to 
     have been the first person in the explosion to reach a 
     hospital. When she recovered from surgery, she kept asking 
     her husband, Jim, about her colleagues.
       Seconds before the explosion, Jim Guthrie had left the 
     office with Bob Armstrong. A VA field investigator of fraud 
     and, like Guthrie, a former Marine, Armstrong had served in 
     Korea and done two tours in Vietnam.
       ``I felt a boom and was picked up off my feet and thrown 
     under a water fountain, and I was thinking, that was fine, 
     since I thought the roof was about to collapse,'' Guthrie 
     said. He heard the second explosion and covered his ears.
       ``The smoke and dust, it was almost immediate,'' he said. 
     ``I couldn't breathe. I kept looking for pockets of air. We 
     were choking and coughing.''
       Armstrong followed Guthrie down the same stairs Dooley had 
     used to escape moments before, but they moved slowly, feeling 
     their way in complete darkness. They finally emerged into the 
     light in the back of the building, the side facing away from 
     the bomb.
       Guthrie is not sure what happened when he emerged from the 
     building. He and Armstrong were covered in dust. ``For the 
     next three or four hours, we just wandered around,'' Guthrie 
     recalled. They wanted to make phone calls, but were afraid to 
     enter the Internal Revenue Service building nearby.
       ``I have never felt so helpless and disoriented,'' Guthrie 
     said. While he stumbled in shock through the streets of 
     downtown Oklahoma City, Guthrie said, he wondered what he had 
     done with his life: ``I could've been dead but I wasn't dead, 
     but I began to imagine all the dead and all the dead before 
     me.''
       When Guthrie and Armstrong emerged from the building, a 
     woman approached screaming at them to save the children in 
     the day-care center on the second floor.
       ``We didn't do anything,'' Guthrie recalled. ``We couldn't 
     do anything. We stood there, dazed and helpless.''
       While the two men stood in a daze, Paul Heath, the 
     psychologist, was sitting at a desk in Diane Dooley's office, 
     debris up to his armpits. ``I was staring ahead and could 
     see, where the building used to be, nothing. I could see 
     across the street.''
       The front of the building fell away almost beneath Heath's 
     feet. He sat for a second half-buried. ``I mean, the roof 
     fell on my head. Aluminum. Light fixtures. Duct work. Wiring. 
     And I could still see what I think was the explosive, the 
     fertilizer, popping, these little sparks, and then the black 
     cloud rolled in.''
       Heath thought it must have been a natural gas explosion. He 
     crawled over his desk and into the front room, clearing a 
     path through the ruins. There he saw Colvin leaning over 
     Ronbaun's crumpled body. ``Stan's hurt real bad,'' Colvin 
     told Heath. Martin Cash, too, was covered in blood, his left 
     arm broken, bruised and deeply cut. Swaying on his feet, Cash 
     announced. ``I think my eye is gone.'' Colvin ripped off his 
     own shirt and held it to Cash's eye. George Denker was 
     without his glasses, fumbling around in the dark.
       ``I told John to stay with Stan, that we'd find a way out 
     and come back,'' Heath recalled. A steady man, Colvin 
     remained with Ronbaun while Heath and the others made it down 
     the back stairs, remained with him even as the building 
     groaned and continued to fall apart and the facade and 
     ceilings gave way.
       Heath returned with a stretcher, carried by a maintenance 
     man whose name he does not remember, and Robert Roddy, who 
     works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 
     Ronbaun is more than six feet tall and weighs about 265 
     pounds. Heath helped carry him out, pushing desks and debris 
     out of the way, but he worried. Heath has a bad heart.
       When Heath emerged from the building, the first person he 
     met was a woman, sobbing and nearly hysterical, whose 
     daughter had been among those in the day-care center. Heath 
     knew the building well, serving as chief medical officer 
     despite the fact that he did not hold a medical degree. He 
     knew the center had taken an almost direct hit, and he feared 
     no one could have survived.
       Later, an old high school classmate whose wife worked for 
     HUD asked for his help in searching for her. ``I asked him 
     where his wife worked, what side of the building, and when he 
     told me. I knew he'd never find her. That floor was gone,'' 
     Heath said.
       Diane Dooley is home now with a smashed wrist, which 
     probably will require bone grafts. Martin Cash is still in 
     Presbyterian Hospital, and it looks as if he may lose an eye. 
     Stan Ronbaun remains at St. Anthony's Hospital and may also 
     lose an eye. The rest of the staff is home. Heath and Guthrie 
     were back at work on Friday at the VA's new temporary 
     quarters at Oklahoma City's VA hospital.
       Paul Heath said he does not find any cosmic significance in 
     the bombing. He believes instead, he said, that ``in my life 
     and the life of others there are these times of extreme pain, 
     and then there are all the good times to help you grow strong 
     and heal.'' And then Heath began, very quietly, to weep.'
       Dooley said that when Heath visited her in the hospital, 
     she told him she had not yet had time to cry. But she has 
     time now.
       ``These veterans are going to want their checks on 
     Monday,'' Dooley said, ``and I don't know how I'm gonna type 
     with one hand.''
       When asked what she would think if the bombers turned out 
     to be former military men with a grudge, she sighed and said 
     it would not surprise her. Dooley said she often thought that 
     someday, some angry and disturbed person, even one of the 
     veterans, might enter the federal building and start 
     shooting. There are no metal detectors and security was 
     light, almost nonexistent.
       Guthrie said, ``I am a solid person, but this whole 
     experience has a lot of psychological effects. I'm rethinking 
     my life. I really am. I want to spend more time with my 
     children and maybe change some other things.''
       In this time when federal bureaucrats are sometimes seen as 
     the source of everything that is wrong with the United 
     States, Paul Heath and his colleagues ask people to remember 
     the good that many federal workers try to do.
       ``We're not heroes,'' he said. ``But I like to think that 
     all of us try to help.''
       On Friday Paul Heath went back into the ruins of the Murrah 
     building one last time. He convinced some local policemen he 
     knew to accompany him up five flights back to his old office 
     to retrieve his computers and his files.
       He stared at the wreckage. The computer monitor on his desk 
     had seemingly been sucked to the floor. There were overturned 
     chairs, wires and insulation. It was an eerie experience--it 
     unnerved him and reminded him how close he and his co-workers 
     had come to death.

  Additionally, although the director of the VA Medical Center in 
Oklahoma City, Mr. Steve Gentling, would assert that he and his staff 
were simply doing their jobs, their many contributions during the 
crisis merit special recognition. Although the following report is only 
a summary of VA activities during the early days of the crisis, it 
vividly demonstrates the exemplary commitment of VA employees:
  Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, VA 
                   Medical Center, Oklahoma City, OK

 summary of oklahoma city vamc actions in response to alfred p. murrah 
                       federal building disaster

       As of 4:00 p.m., April 21, 1995, the VAMC had taken the 
     following actions in response to the April 19, 1995, bombing 
     of the Murrah building:
       [[Page E892]] Received 12 casualties, beginning at 10:50 
     a.m. One of the casualties was a veteran; two were children, 
     both of whom were treated and referred to Children's 
     Hospital. Three people were admitted to the hospital and 
     discharged on April 21.
       Sent a four-person triage team to the site of the bombing 
     immediately after the disaster occurred.
       Sent 19 critical care nurses and emergency employees to the 
     closest hospital to the disaster, St. Anthony's Hospital.
       Sent triage supplies to St. Anthony's Hospital.
       Sent 14 crisis intervention team members, primarily 
     psychiatrists and psychologists, to three assistance 
     locations--the disaster site, the American Red Cross and the 
     First Christian Church.
       At the request of the American Red Cross, sent Dr. John 
     Tassey, Director VAMC Behavioral Medicine Service, to serve 
     as coordinator/liaison for Oklahoma City mental health 
     response coordination with the National American Red Cross.
       Set up offices for Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) 
     operations on the first floor of the VAMC. VBA Operations 
     commenced at 9 a.m. on April 20.
       Set up office space in the VAMC for two of the forensic 
     teams from the Public Health Service.
       VAMC Psychiatry and Psychology employees, including the 
     Chief of Psychiatry Service, Dr. Charles Smith, answered 
     telephones for the American Red Cross Crisis Intervention 
     Center continuously for 36 hours.
       Set up a blood donor team to identify employees with rare 
     blood types to be prepared for requests for those blood 
     types. Collected blood donations from donors, some of whom 
     waited 5 hours to donate.
       Sent chaplains for coverage in one of the community clinic 
     centers set up in local churches on April 20-21.
       Establsihed a VAMC-sponsored community hotline for post-
     trauma counseling through the American Red Cross. The 
     American Red Cross will issue the hotline number and the 
     calls will be referred to VAMC staff.
       Will hold two ``Group Counseling'' sessions on April 21 and 
     24 open to all VAMC employees. Will schedule additional 
     sessions as needed.
       Sent 2 VAMC pathologists to the State Medical Examines 
     Office for assistance.
       Sent Paul Farney, VAMC Supervisory Technologist in 
     Radiology Service, to the State Medical Examiners Office to 
     serve as Coordinator for all city hospital radiology 
     technicians.
       Sent 2 vehicles and drivers to transport Radiology film for 
     development at the VAMC for return to the State Medical 
     Examiner. The effort is anticipated to continue for the next 
     6 days.
       Assisted the State Medical Examiner's office in leasing a 
     portable X-ray machine, and with procuring supplies and 
     technical assistance.
       Provided gowns, scrub suits, masks, gloves, and jaw 
     stretchers to the State Medical Examiners Office.
       Dick Campbell, Chief Human Resources Management, and 
     Chairman of the Federal Personnel Council, is organizing the 
     effort with other agencies to reconstruct the personnel 
     records of Federal Building employees whose records were 
     destroyed.
       Providing sleeping/showering facilities for firefighters 
     and rescue workers in the auditorium area of the Health Wing 
     of the VAMC.
       Fred Gusman, M.S.W., head of the VA Disaster Mental Health 
     Trauma Team, will be reporting to the VAMC to provide mental 
     health counseling/coordination.
       Established Oklahoma City Family Assistance Relief Fund at 
     the Oklahoma Federal Credit Union.
     

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