Orrin G. Hatch

“Duty, Honor, Country.”

While that is the United States Military Academy’s official motto, those same principles are espoused by graduates from all our nation’s military academies who have served honorably on the field of battle and in every other endeavor to protect our freedoms.

As Gen. Douglas MacArthur so eloquently remarked to West Point cadets a half-century ago:

“Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you want to be, what you can be, what you will be … They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.”

Certainly MacArthur – a West Point graduate who reclaimed the Philippines and accepted the instruments of surrender from the Japanese in World War II – exemplified many of those qualities. So have many other officers who graduated from West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

In fact, many of our academies’ most distinguished graduates have hailed from Utah -- people such as Ogden native Brent Scowcroft, a West Point alumnus whose distinguished military career was followed by service as the U.S. National Security Advisor under Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H. W. Bush and as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Another was West Point graduate Richard Whitehead Young, a Salt Lake City native and Army brigadier general who led the Utah Light Artillery in the Spanish-American War and was appointed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines when that country was a U.S. territory.

While much has changed since that war, there has been one constant. Our service academies continue to attract the best and brightest, including many of our finest young men and women in Utah. They have to be exceptional because gaining admittance into this elite fraternity is not easy.

While the standards vary at each academy, candidates given serious consideration must demonstrate excellence both inside and outside the classroom – on test scores, in interviews, in the community and with respect to leadership and physical fitness. They also have to receive a nomination.

As a U.S. senator, I have the privilege of nominating 10 candidates for each vacancy at the service academies. For those who desire to attend an academy next June, I am accepting nomination applications postmarked until Oct. 31^st of this year. For information and to apply, go to my web site at http://hatch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/academy-nominations and fill out the appropriate forms.

Once I make recommendations, it is up to the individual academies to make their selections. For those who are appointed, it is an incredible honor and sacred responsibility. At our military academies, they will be molded into officers who will be worthy to be entrusted with the defense of our nation and our liberties.

Like so many before them, the knowledge and skills they learn at the academies will linger long in their memories. And when the time comes for them to pass on the responsibility for America’s defense to the next generation, they too may feel to exclaim with Gen. MacArthur:

“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.”

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah