If we look to the answer, as to why for so many years we achieved so much,

prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land, we unleashed the energy

and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before.

Freedom and the dignity of the individual

have been more available and assured here

than in any other place on earth.

The price for this freedom at times has been high,

but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes,

they just don't know where to look.

The sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery

with its row of simple white markers, bearing crosses, or stars of David,

they add up to only a tiny fraction of the price

that has been paid for our freedom.

Each one of those markers is a monument

to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Bellowood, the Argon,

Omaha Beach, Salerno, and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal,

Tarawa, Porkchop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.

Under one such marker lies a young man, Martin Treptown, who left his job in a small town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed

Rainbow Division. There on the Western Front, he was killed trying to carry a message

between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We're told that on his body was found a diary.

On the fly leaf, under the heading my pledge, he had written these words.

...