Today many people say, “Where do these soldiers get all this peace stuff we extreme pacifists take away from them?” The answer lies in cold facts--cold facts the historians don’t tell us--cover up almost completely. Lewis and Clark, for instance. Why, yes, they were two fellows who were the first to go across our Continent and back again. But who ever told you that it was _Captain_ Meriwether Lewis and _Lieutenant_ William Clark who took four sergeants and twenty-three privates in that hazardous trek between the Atlantic and the Pacific from 1803 to 1806--that it was the soldier who made surveys and maps and created friendships with the Indians, many of whom were seeing a white man for the first time? Pike’s Peak! O yes, that was discovered by a man by the name of Pike. But where was it mentioned that it was _Lieutenant_ Z. M. Pike? And what did he do? With three non-commissioned officers and sixteen privates, he explored in 1806 and 1807 from the source of the Mississippi to its mouth, doing from north to south what Lewis and Clark had done from east to west. Turning west he discovered the peak which bears his name. In what is now New Mexico, he even beguiled the Spaniards into taking him prisoner so that he could learn their intentions, customs and country. For his great deeds of exploration and pacification he received the personal praise of the President of the United States. Then there was Captain Long who in the same way went through what is now Colorado, and for whom Long’s Peak is named; Captain Bonneville who voluntarily lived with the Nez Perces and Flatheads for five years, creating friendships and learning their language; Lieutenant Litgreaves, who explored the Colorado River; and Lieutenant Whipple and Lieutenant Ives, who separately went through the southwest. And then John C. Fremont. O yes, the histories are crazy about calling him the Pathfinder, but never told you that it was Lieutenant John C. Fremont in 1838 when he started out, and Lieutenant Colonel John C. Fremont in 1844--after he had explored 10,000 miles of freezing mountain and sickly basin? In this brief space I can’t even touch on many of these gigantic wedges of understanding. It was the soldier who made the first trails, dug the first wells, built the first roads, bridges and canals, made the first maps, surveyed most of our boundaries, erected most of our lighthouses, dredged our harbors and waterways, escorted the settlers, braved the Indian and suffered in silence. The Hon. John W. Weeks, former Secretary of War and United States Senator, wrote: “The Army was virtually the pioneer of pioneers. As our citizens moved west over the prairies and through forests, they traveled routes which were surveyed by army engineers, constructed by the army and protected by military posts. The titles of their land were valid only because of army surveys.... Up to 1855 there was scarcely a railroad in this country that was not projected, built, and operated