 A company of heroes assembles here. Men long dead and others living still. In this corridor, where honor is paid the deeds of men who through a century of wars have earned the medals and decorations of the nation's military services. Ghosts whose bodies sleep at Shiloh and beneath coral beaches on islands burning in the sun. And the spirits of other men who live today to remember what it was like at Bastogne or on a carrier at Laity Gulf or in the skies above Korea. All are represented here in this hall where heroes walk, wearing the proud symbols of service with distinction, symbols lustered with the gleam of gallantry, commemorating courage under the pressures of combat, spanning the spectrum of human bravery in its severest tests, culminating in the greatest symbol of all, the Medal of Honor awarded in two versions for gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. He weeps and feeds on the insubstantial stuff of dreams. But there's also an ability in him, a clean hard gem of splendor packed into the frail clay by the hand of God. The source of those virtues which are his special glory and which enable him to raise his eyes to the stars even when his feet are in the mud. Such a virtue is his power to love. Such is his knowledge of beauty. Such is his courage. Men in their tribes and the societies they've built, in their homes and nation states and in their armies have always honored courage when they found it among their own. For this quality, courage, bravery, whatever name we call it by, is the royal virtue. And men, when they see it, glimpse the nobility of their line. In its reflected glow, all men are king. History gave us as a nation, particular reason to prize this virtue when it imposed upon us its special challenge to win independence in a test of fire. Beginning with the Tattered Army, which wrote the word Patriot in steel and smoke on the emerging mind of a young nation. Beginning there, brave men carried the American dream in their stout hearts and fought for it and died for it in every test of strength and will our nation faced in its first century. They were unsung most of these early heroes. No medals were forged in their name or their honor. For we were still rebelling in those days of our lusty youth against our old world heritage and medals we thought were the trappings of Europe's armies, not those of a young democracy. Before that first century was over, came the conflict which shook this nation to its fundamentals and marked in deep suffering the beginning of its maturity, the civil war. Hopefully conceived, so proudly constructed, the American Union now lay bleeding and perhaps dying. Searching in its agony for the promise of its future, it found itself looking into the eyes of its sons. For here now, more than anywhere else, lay the meaning and the hope of the American experience. The nation had shaped the man and now in a moment of historic crisis, the man carried whatever hope existed for the nation's continued life. Whether the Union endured would depend heavily on his personal faith in the Union's cause and his ability to prove that faith in the most demanding of all tests. And a grateful people in the midst of war forged a medal to honor that courage. In the swirling fury of battlefields which scarred the American heart, the Medal of Honor was born. The civil war was deeply felt on both sides. The cause to each was sacred. Bravery wore a gray uniform as well as blue. But in the perspective of history, the preservation of the Union was the greater cause. And the Medals of Honor awarded to the Army, Navy, and Marines in that war are testaments to brave deeds which gave us the Union forever. In the War of its Birth, the Medal of Honor was the only award for gallantry in action. Later, other medals would be created to commemorate bravery in all its forms. And in the process of this distillation, the Medal of Honor would emerge as the supreme award, earned only by gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty. With the tragic war over, the nation took up the heavy task of binding its war. The guns of the big war were silent now. But on the Western frontier, the fires of another kind of war still flamed. Charged with the task of making the frontier safe was the regular army. Out West, that meant the cavalry. The enemy was no soldier in gray now, but a bronzed warrior in buckskin lashing out suddenly against the beleaguered stockade. In the hot and dusty Arizona sun, in the biting, freezing Nebraska snows, into the face of danger hundreds of times the cavalry rode. Rugged leather-skinned soldiers on horseback, in their defense of the frontier, they bore the brunt of the attacks of hostile tribes. Many men who fought their lonely battles and died their lonely deaths in this distant America, which has passed into legend, won medals of honor. The names of their battlegrounds are obscure now, most of them. But some still ring in our national memory and always will. Names like Little Big Horn, where a saber-wielding cabaretman outnumbered but not out forth went down to the onslaught of the Indian charge. In the hard, grinding years of the Indian wars, 415 army men who fought America's battles on those distant plains were to receive the medal of honor. Not all of these heroes lived to hear about it, but for those who came after them, their names had passed into golden legend. It's 1898 now. The century of consolidation of cataclysmic change, of division and re-appamation, is drawing to a close. The nation hears the first faint echo of history's insistence that it looked beyond its own shores and take its place in the world at large. In Cuba, Havana Harbor is shaken by an enormous explosion, one whose thundering reverberations sound from shore to shore in our land. The explosion is caused by the sinking of the United States battleship Maine, sent to Cuba to protect Americans during the Cuban battle for liberty against Spain. The cry, remember the Maine, sweeps the nation. And men shouted it louder than a band of rugged men called the Rough Riders. Led by Fioro Roosevelt, they were to be in the vanguard of the force to land in Cuba as allies of the Cuban people against their Spanish rulers. Roosevelt and Colonel Leonard Wood recruited about a thousand men who were to be good shots and good riders and a tough and hardy lot they were. Their greatest day was July 1st, 1898. Their objective was a crucial hill in enemy hands. To reach it, they had to advance under deadly fire every bit of the way, headed to the top. And history recorded the George Upsan Juan Hill as one of its most stirring chapters of courage and combat. 30 army men were to be paid our nation's highest tribute in that short but fiercely fought war. Together with 81 Navy and Marine fighting men, they were the first to win medals of honor on foreign soil. The Spanish American War wouldn't be the last time America's soldiers would fight on land far removed from their own. The end of that war brought international responsibilities. And over the years, these responsibilities would grow. And an America which had believed it could lock its interests behind its own frontiers would be shocked into an awareness that trouble in a far away place might well signal a new challenge for American troops. We who live in this tense and global day have learned to live with that idea. But to those of an earlier time, suspicious of foreign entanglements and foreign adventures, the idea was shattering. Consider, for instance, the shock to America in the first year of the new century when it found that developments in far off China called for the presence, the fighting presence, of United States troops. Thousands of fanatical Chinese laid siege to foreign embassies in the capital city of Beijing. As engagements go, the Boxer Rebellion was a minor one. It occupies little more than a footnote in our military history. But brave men fought there. And some of them won the Medal of Honor. And of these winners, one man's courageous action has come down through the years as a symbol of the kind of courage which the bravest of the brave have displayed in all wars. He was a bugler with an infantry regiment. The Americans and other forces trying to relieve the besieged embassies were blocked by a 30 foot wall. The buglers company commander called for a volunteer to scale the wall. And the young soldier's ringing response, I'll try, sir, has become an example of high courage and an inspiration to infantrymen ever since. Curiously a decade after the Boxer Rebellion, United States Army soldiers were riding through the dry desert dust south of the Mexican border. A Mexican bandit named Pancho Villa had stirred up deep trouble by destroying American lives and property. An American expeditionary force had been sent in to eliminate the trouble. And America's fortunate to have that man, that member of a special breed who served beyond the call there at the moment he's needed. But if the nation had felt the need of him up to this time, and certainly it had, it could hardly face the challenges that lay ahead without him. For now the door to the new world, the world we live in today, was opening wide. And events beyond our control, but not beyond our interests, were driving us irrevocably into it. The shape of this world would be determined largely on fields of battle, reluctantly but inevitably. For now we could do no other. We would take our position on those fields far removed from the American continent. The war America entered in 1917 was a new kind of war. The truck and the tank and the machine gun had come and combat was never to be the same again. The war that lay waiting for the dough boy was one of massed firepower and long trench lines basing each other across the graveyard of a no man's land. Americans fought a vigorous offensive of small units sweeping through fortified German defenses taking the war out of the trenches in which it had been stalemated. What kind of face does courage wear in such a war? The one it has always worn. For the face of courage does not change, however much the weapons and tactics change with which the courageous man fights. In World War I, that special courage, summoned by the man who takes his life in his hands to do what must be done above and beyond the call of duty, wore the faces of 95 brave men of all surfaces. Courage and battle did find a new proving ground in World War I. The air. The airplane had barely emerged from its experimental status and now it was a formidable weapon of war. And the ranks of Medal of Honor winners who had fought on land and sea were increased by men who wrote their records of bravery in the sky. World War I, with its particular call on bravery and a kind of war new to the world at that time, saw the introduction of the airplane in combat. Scared me a generation later, a Second World War came to America on the wings of the same machine. Now a highly developed weapon of destruction. 14 million Americans served in uniform during this greatest and most destructive war in history. 430 of these would earn the right to wear the Medal of Honor in virtually every spot on the globe where Americans fought. And how would each man win? By standing for a moment in time alone, lighted by a fire which kindles in all men but rages in a special few in special times. Who was he? The man who served above and beyond the call of duty in World War II. He was a Marine from Ohio, a private first class serving on Guadalcanal. His machine gun emplacement took the full brunt of an all out assault. His orders were hold the position. Through the night he held off the Japanese. Weary and exhausted toward morning, he did not see an enemy soldier approach until too late. Then determined to save his comrades, he eaped up, absorbed the violence in his own body and yielded up his life. He was an army platoon leader whose unit was pinned down by the Germans locking in American advance. Ordering his men to cover him, he went forward alone and destroyed the enemy's stronghold. When his job was done, he brought his men forward. And in the process memorialized the heroic stance of leadership wherever men fight. He was a naval officer. Commander of the submarine coordinated attack group off Truck Island. He alone of the group possessed secret intelligence information of our submarine strategy. He carried out his secret orders and the enemy paid dearly. Once his own flag submarine was rocked and battered by Japanese depth charges. The damage was soon beyond repair. The commander decided to surface the flagship and engage the enemy in a gun fight so the men might have a chance to abandon ship and live. But for himself, the decision he made was considerably different. Rather than risk capture and possibly reveal secret plans under enemy torture or use of drugs, he decided that he would remain aboard the vessel. He would stay with it in its final plunge to the bottom. He was a flying colonel who led a mission which seemed incredible in 1942. One which started with bombers being lifted from the deck of an aircraft carrier. For these planes were destined for Japan and the Air Force then had no suitable airfields close enough for them to leave from. In those dark early months of the war, the mission of these volunteer airmen electrified the country with a thrill of hope and pride. They carried the war to the enemy to a confident Tokyo which then believed itself invulnerable to attack. So audacious was the mission, so daring in conception and performance, the Japanese defenders were caught by complete surprise. The attackers came roaring in over the Japanese mainland and first blood, the first of much to follow, was drawn from the enemy. He was a general of the army who sent a thrill through the allied world by returning victorious as he had promised to a land he had been forced to withdraw from in the face of overwhelming forces. Not many general officers had won the coveted medal, but it is meaningless to talk of the Medal of Honor in terms of rank. Generals can win it and corporals can win it and admirals and seamen. Bravery knows no rank and it knows no station. The medal can be and has been won by every kind of man our society has produced. It can be won in wars of all kinds as it has been in our time, from the mighty epic of a war that stretched across the world to one localized on the narrow peninsula of Korea. In the hills of this divided and far off land, Americans faced communist guns for the first time. Korea was a war of symbol. It was freedom itself that was attacked and it was in the cause of freedom that men stood and fought. Behind the symbol, it was a war of flesh and steel. The fighting was bitter and intense. 131 Americans who fought here joined the select ranks of the bravest of the brave. Some fell, some lived. Some understood clearly the contribution to freedom's defense they made. Others perhaps saw the issues dim. But each of them reached the summit of America's pyramid of honor by a supreme act of bravery above and beyond the court. The Korean armistice, the guns of Americans in war were silenced. The braved deed in combat was recorded. And thus, in a sense, the story of the Medal of Honor to this day is closed. The heroic adventures of the 3,156 who have won it in a century of wars are preserved between the bindings of official history and all are woven into the living legend of a people and a people spirit. For this very reason, the story of the Medal of Honor is not ended. And indeed cannot end. But the particular essence of the Medal is not what it is or even the epic tales of those who've earned it. But more than anything else, what it represents. Precious quality which Lincoln called devotion, transformed in an atmosphere of danger into a courage whose presence and noble man, such a quality does not die. It lives unflowered and unseen. But if it's needed, it's there. Once more, America stands in crisis. And as in other days, searching for the promise of its future, it finds itself looking into the eyes of its sons. Their defense of freedom is a silent one, but most solidly real. Their mission, urgent in the eyes of mankind, demands more of patience and skill of effort and adjustment and quiet determination than it does of courage. They train so that war with its special call for bravery will never come. The seeds of bravery lie there and they will blossom if they must in fields where they have grown before, where they have always grown, in the stout parts of men. The links in the soldier's tradition are strong and the heritage of those who serve today reaches far. And most prized of all in this heritage is the tradition of courage, refined into the special quality whose presence is felt here in this hall of glory, where ghosts of heroes walk, keeping vigil on a nation's pride.