by: Paul Demko
Fri May 23, 2008 at 2:29:05 PM
Steve Sarvi first met Rep. John Kline in 2004, at Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo. The staff seargent was serving with the Minnesota National Guard, patrolling the border with Macedonia for smugglers. The then-freshman congressman was on a fact-finding mission and stopped by to visit with troops and gauge morale.
What Kline heard from the soldiers were complaints about their inability to utilize educational benefits because they kept getting deployed overseas by the country's over-extended military. Kline's response, as Sarvi tells it, was a variation on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's infamous military maxim: you go to war with the army you have.
"While he was sympathetic to the soldiers saying we can't even go to school using the benefits that we have," Sarvi recalls, "it was, 'Well that's just the situation we find ourselves in.'"