WASHINGTON  -  “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” reads the inscription on the General Post Office in New York City.  We are all familiar with this quotation; it represents the dedication of our postal workers to their duties under any conditions.  The words were written 2,500 years ago by Herodotus while on a Greek military
expedition.

This week, however, we will add a designation to the U.S. Mail Processing and
Distribution Facility in Cape Girardeau.  The name of Richard G. Wilson will adorn it.  And though his name is unfamiliar to many Southern Missourians, his heroism is as recognizable as the postman who delivers our mail every day.

This is Richard G. Wilson’s story:

Richard G. Wilson was a private in the U.S. Army.  He volunteered for his country, and
he left his home in Southern Missouri to go to Korea.  He went to serve, not necessarily to fight, as a medic in the 187th Airborne. 

His unit came under attack near Opari, Korea.  His commanding officer gave the order to retreat from the ambush, and the unit fell back.  But Private Wilson saw a fallen soldier who had been left behind was trying to crawl to safety. Against a direct order, he sprang into action and returned to the field of battle.  Private Wilson was unarmed.

The next morning, his unit found Private Wilson side by side with the man he risked his life for, dead.

How he spent the last moments of his life is not known, but I can make a guess.  He was giving comfort to that soldier, bearing hope to the man who thought all was lost.  He was using the values, the morality, and the compassion that he learned growing up in Southern Missouri and applying all of them on a battlefield 6,000 miles from his home.

Private Wilson was posthumously awarded the highest medal that can be given in
this nation – the Congressional Medal of Honor – for his heroism.

That medal belongs to his family, but Private Wilson’s story belongs to all of us.  That
is why a postal worker from Farmington, Tony Carroll, began a grassroots effort to rename the Cape Girardeau postal facility for Private Wilson. I introduced the bill in the House of Representatives, Senator Kit Bond did the same in the Senate, and once we got the bill passed, President Bush signed it into law.

There is one more inscription, this time in Washington, that guided this mission.  It is on the National Mall, inscribed in the Korean War Memorial, and it simply reads: Freedom Is Not Free.

And Private Wilson serves to remind us of this patriotic fact as well.  It is something we have known throughout the ages – but the four words are particularly potent today. 

Freedom Is Not Free.

Private Wilson, too, knew this.  He knew a great cost would accompany his bravery.  It did not sway him from heroic action.  It did not cause him to hesitate.  Nothing could have kept him from his task – neither fear nor pain nor regard for his safety – because he was making his appointed rounds, a medic in the U.S. Army.

So the Richard G. Wilson postal facility will officially become a reality this week, and the
story will run full circle.  From the battlefields of ancient Greece to the war in Korea, from a post office in New York to one in Cape Girardeau, from the Korean War Memorial in Washington to the memory of Missouri’s brave son, from a fallen hero to his rising memory, the tale is completed by a final inscription: