Honor the Brave - America's Wars and Warriors

At the start of a new millennium, Honor the Brave reminds us of sacrifices made, lives lost or forever changed, and the monumental bravery of the men and women who fought to make and keep America free. It tells the story of America’s heroes: the soldiers, sailors, and flyers who fought at places forever etched in our history—Lexington, Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Normandy, Iwo Jima, the 38th Parallel, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the deserts of Kuwait. Honor the Brave follows our nation’s military history and recounts the battlefront experience of America’s fighting men and women. From Washington’s citizen army to the soldiers in the Persian Gulf, we hear their stories in their own words and recollections. The patriots who stood at Lexington Green in 1775, and those who stood and marched with Washington—including men like Paul Revere, Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, Benedict Arnold, and Nathaniel Green—established a nation. Defending the new nation in the War of 1812 and the war with Mexico required heroes like Andrew Jackson, Stephen Van Rensselaer, Oliver Perry, Sam Houston, and Jim Bowie. The terrible conflict that tore our nation apart was fought with courage and heroism by countless brave soldiers—George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, George C. Meade, Winfield Hancock, Joshua Chamberlain, George Pickett, Stonewall Jackson, and William Tecumseh Sherman. In the 20th century, as conflicts became global, American soldiers and sailors left their homes for other lands, fighting in Havana Harbor, charging up San Juan Hill, and dying in the trenches of World War I’s ravaged Europe—among them George Dewey, Clara Barton, Joseph Wheeler, Theodore Roosevelt, John Ord, John J. Pershing, Charles Biddle, and Henry Johnson. In World War II, men and women in America’s armed forces waged battle against the forces of dictatorship and tyranny.