Helms Puts Stamp on Troop Bill

The Senate voted Monday to give free mailing privileges to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, but only after Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) edged out plans by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) to sponsor the legislation.

Cranston had announced in a press release that he planned to offer such a measure today, after returning from a trip to the Middle East and a stopover in California.

The senator said he had been asked by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, for “help in getting this morale boost for his troops.”

But Helms, who also was on the trip with Cranston, beat the Californian to the punch in a classic display of congressional one-upmanship.

Helms offered his free-mail amendment to the Postal Service appropriations bill shortly after Cranston’s press release went out. He said that he had talked to Schwarzkopf’s superior, President Bush, about the matter “and he wants to do something about it.”

While he had found morale “very high,” Helms said, the troops repeatedly complained that “they could not get stamps and, if by some chance some stamps came their way, they were soon stuck together by the humidity and the sweat.”

The bill, passed on a voice vote, still must be approved by the House. It would grant troops the privilege that soldiers in the Vietnam War had: simply writing their name in the corner of the envelope.

It is the same free mailing privilege--called the frank--that members of Congress enjoy.