Senator Kevin Cramer, RN.D., said he opposes Anthony Tata’s nomination as undersecretary of defense for politics unless the Defense Department changes its position by adding the names of the sailors killed in the USS Frank E Evans for half a century ago to the memorial in Washington.
“If the department does not make significant changes to its policy, I plan to oppose Tata’s nomination,” Cramer said in a statement last week before a hearing Thursday on Tata’s nomination before the Armed Services Committee.
There are 14 Republicans and 13 Democrats on the committee. If Cramer maintains his position and votes against the nomination, he would tip the balance against Tata.
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Democrats on the committee oppose the nomination of Tata, a retired brigadier general from the Army, for different reasons: tweets in 2018 in which he called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” who did more to harm the United States. “and help Islamic countries than any president in history.” In another radio appearance, he attributed the Iran nuclear deal to Obama’s “Islamic roots”, saying the deal was an attempt “to help the Iranians and the great Islamic state to crush Israel.”
But Cramer’s problem is “Lost 74”: crew members who were killed in the South China Sea in 1969 when another ship struck Evans during maneuvers with the Australian and New Zealand navies. An Australian aircraft carrier “criticized” the destroyer, cutting Evans’ bow, the survivors said.
“Our ship was cut in half and the bow’s half of the ship sank in five minutes and led to 74 sailors dying,” Richard Grant, One of the 199 survivors, wrote in a letter to the editor in The Forum newspaper in Fargo-Moorhead, North Dakota, in 2018.
Among the dead were the three wise brothers from Niobrara, Nebraska: Gary, 22, Gregory, 21, and Kelly, 19.
Because the ship was more than 100 miles from Vietnam at the time, the sailors did not consider themselves war dead, and their names were not included on the memorial wall.
“It made no sense to me that a sailor ship that had just left the combat zone and was returning to the combat zone, and in the meantime doing war readiness exercises, was not worth commemorating,” Cramer said. told The Bismarck, North Dakota, Tribune last year.
A relative of Grant brought the issue to Cramer’s attention at a town hall meeting in 2018, when Cramer was in the House.
“The story touched me deeply and I introduced an amendment to last year’s National Defense Authorization Act to inscribe the names of the 74 sailors on the monument. While the measure passed unanimously in the House, it did not pass the Senate,” said. He wrote in an essay last year marking the 50th anniversary of the accident.
Despite strong bipartisan support for a similar measure in the Senate, the bill has yet to pass. Cramer tried to push it through a process called unanimous consent this year, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, blocked it. Murkowski cited “legal considerations and practical techniques” for the objection.
In addition to the Defense Department’s position that the ship was outside the 100-mile combat zone, the agency has resisted adding names to the wall because they are organized by date, which would make adding the 74 names to the most of 58,000 that are already logistically difficult.
In testimony last year to the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources on National Parks, Daniel Smith, then deputy director of the National Park Service, said that including the 74 names “will be difficult to achieve in the way the wall “and that” would require a substantial modification, and possibly a total replacement, of the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “
Now Cramer is heavily arming the Defense Department to add the names, challenging what he called “a policy based on arbitrary Defense Department guidelines applied by unelected bureaucrats.”
The White House has maintained its support for Tata, who has been a pro-Trump commentator on Fox News.
In the statement he released last week, Cramer said of Tata: “I hope to hear some positive news from your audience next week.”
