On Father's Day 1998, at the request of Jaime Pacheco's family, I posted my first web page  on the internet. Jaime was my closest friend, an Army Ranger who was killed in Vietnam two months after I came home, and whose son I had sought to find for 26 years. (Click on the photo of Jaime at right if you have not previously read the story that started this all.)

Jaime's life, and death, have always had a major impact on my life, and when his surviving son, mother, brothers and sisters asked me to convert the small booklet I had written about him after his death, Jaime launched me on what would become an all-consuming, life-altering experience.

Learning from that first web experience just how uncomplicated web page authoring could be, on July 26, 1998, I opened HomeOfHeroes.com on a free server at Geocities. My intent was to author just a few pages, mirroring the design of a Medal of Honor museum in my mind. Like the ever-growing, ever-more-demanding plant in the play "Little Shop of Horrors" however, I could not then imagine, nor can I now even comprehend as we celebrate TEN YEARS ONLINE, how that "simple project" has ballooned, or how much my focus had changed.

Ten Years of Growth and Expansion

• 1999 - I began authoring a series of TEN stories in a new feature called The Brotherhood of Soldiers at War, posting a new story each day in the two weeks before Veterans Day. It was a new step that eventually launched my efforts to include narrative Medal of Honor stories in the website that now includes Profiles in Courage, Shinmiyangyo, A Splendid Little War, Go For Broke, Day of Infamy, and Wings of Valor.
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• 2000 - In a year and a half our website had grown to more than 5,000 pages, including citations for all Medal of Honor awards, and I was paying $75 per month for the extra (above the cap) space allowed at Geocities.  Someone suggested that we begin posting photos of the individual MOH recipients. At that time the Director of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society estimated that we might find as many as 1,500 recipient photos were in circulation. Today, we have posted photos of nearly 2,000 recipients, far exceeding what we could have hoped for. With the ever-growing size of our site, that same year we moved from Geocities to a new hosting plan with Valueweb, a commercial Web Hosting Service, increasing both the amount of material we could include and the bandwidth allowed each month, for only slightly more than we had been paying to Geocities. We continue to be hosted on a Valueweb server to the present.
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• 2001 - The ever-increasing demands for PRINTABLE material prompted me to start offering our stories in E-Book format, freely downloadable. These included printable versions of our feature stories, as well as printable books targeting unique categories of Medal of Honor recipients (by ethnicity, Military Occupation Specialty, etc.) in a section we call the E-Book Publisher.
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• 2002 - This year marked perhaps the single largest change in both the emphasis and the direction of HomeOfHeroes.com. With the Internet growing rapidly, many new websites had sprung up to detail the lives and heroism of Medal of Honor recipients, but there remained a total lack of information on heroes who had received other high awards. Several visitors suggested that I begin compiling citations for the Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, and Navy Cross, something that has never been done before, EVEN by the various branches of service. Initially I believed it would be impossible to achieve this goal, but today we believe we have identified at least 99.9 per cent of the recipients of these awards (numbering some 20,000 recipients), and have posted the citations for more than 15,000 of them.
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• 2003 - For years as a result of the list of Medal of Honor recipients in the web site, we had been forced to confront a couple of Medal of Honor imposters. As we began posting the names and citations of DSC/NX/AFC recipients, more and more imposters were being found and 2003 set the stage for what was to come in 2004/05/06.
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• 2004 - The year marked one of our greatest successes, and one of our saddest failures. It was this year I saw the video documentary we had been working with CaptureIt Productions for several years released. The video premiered at the inaugural meeting of a new organization we spearheaded, "Family and Friends of the Congressional Medal of Honor." This was a sincere attempt to build an organization of family members of MOH recipients, researchers, and others, to support the Medal of Honor Society and to promote history and patriotism. The 2004 convention in Pueblo was inspiring and the convention dinner including the video premier packed the Pueblo Convention Center. Sadly however, the organization lasted only briefly and was dropped in 2005. The Beyond the Medal Videos did go on to sweeping success, and was placed in every High School in American thanks to the Perot Family Foundation.
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• 2005 - Work continued on the regular efforts of the website in 2005 including authoring more stories, finding and posting more MOH recipient photos, and identifying and posting citations for DSC/AFC/NX recipients. It was a year that also revealed fraudulent heroes at the rate of two or three each week. Our crowning achievement that year however, came in September when the website became the focal point of the "Home Of Heroes Katrina Relocation Program" which, in the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, we led one of the first efforts to relocate families. Within ten days of the disaster, while FEMA still struggled to figure out how to address the problem and tens of thousands of survivors were trying to sustain in the Astro Dome, through our local program that had wide-ranging impact, we had already placed seventeen families in furnished and grocery-stocked homes in Pueblo that were rent and utilities free for from six months to a year. Before the end of September our program directly relocated more than 100 families in the Pueblo area, and facilitated the relocation of as many as 1,500 families in other communities across a half-dozen states. You can still read some of the news reports of that program HERE.
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• 2006 STOLEN VALOR - Largely as a direct result of the growing indexes of REAL recipients of our highest military awards, the problem of imposters became increasingly highlighted. In 2005, based upon a paper written by my wife Pam illustrating the problem she had witnessed in my own work through HomeOfHeroes.com, Congressman John Salazar introduced the "Stolen Valor Act of 2005." Every spare minute in the year 2006 was almost ENTIRELY devoted to trying to get the Act passed. There were thousands of calls and faxes to members of Congress, scores of email updates and lobby efforts, and repeated collarboration with news reporters on stories. While the successful passage of that sweeping legislation in late 2006 was the result of a team effort by thousands of veterans and many organizations, HomeOfHeroes.com led the way and was the Pointman for the effort. I personally appeared repeatedly on FOX News, ABCs Good Morning America, and other national programs. Meanwhile, examples of scores of phony heroes were brought to media attention and Congress acted in December 2006 to pass the Stolen Valor Act. To read the story the Capitol Hill newspaper "Roll Call" did on this effort, Click HERE. If the day comes that I can no longer continue this website, I will count the Stolen Valor Act as the single-greatest accomplishment I have been privileged to be a part of and that the website has contributed to.
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• 2007 - After starting the work to identify and digitize citations for awards of the DSC/NX/AFC, I began to receive scores of emails asking when I planned to do the same for Silver Star awards. Estimating that these numbered somewhere around 130,000, I believed this was an impossible task. In January 2007 however, encouraged by what I had learned in researching the top awards, I decided to expand my database to include the Silver Star. This has proven to be the biggest and perhaps WORST over-reach in the history of HomeOfHeroes.com, but as of our tenth anniversary, I am pleased to note that we have identified and posted the names of some 85,000 recipients of the Silver Star, and digitized and posted citations or synopsis for more than 5,000.

• 2008 - ROLL OF VALOR: My good friend John Hoellwarth, whose work as a reporter for Marine Corps Times had been critical to the success of the Stolen Valor Act in 2006, called me in January 2007 and asked me when I was going to start working on the sequel. Previously I had indicated to him that when I authored the SV Act, it was just Part I of a two-part series of valor bills; the second calling for a National Database, done officially by DoD, of the recipients of ALL military awards in history. Initially I declined, telling John that the SV Act had pretty well worn me out and disillusioned me in Congress, and that I didn't have it in me to "go another round with the politicians." John was persistent however, and by the fall of 2007 the "Military Valor Roll of Honor Act" was introduced in Congress, calling on DoD to do OFFICIALLY, what I've been doing unofficially and piece-meal for years.
  
  Presently, the Military Valor Roll of Honor Act has nearly 70 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Because this is an election year however, and Congress has so very few session days remaining, it is doubtful we will see success this year. Perhaps we will see success in the next Congress, but in the meantime, I will continue to do what needs to be done to identify and preserve the history of our heroes.

THE TEAM

Looking back on TEN YEARS with HomeOfHeroes.com, I am both humbled and amazed...humbled that I have been blessed share in something that has had such a positive impact, amazed that so much has been accomplished. While I have mourned the loss of my friend Jaime Pacheco for more than three decades, as I have told his son, because of Jaime millions of people are impacted in a positive way every year.

Meanwhile I am ever cognizant that nothing GREAT is ever accomplished by one person, or one couple (my wife Pam is equally involved in this effort) alone. It has taken teamwork to keep this project going. I cannot express my gratitude enough to friends like fellow veteran Chuck Sughrue from whom, EVERY MONTH since the website was first posted, sends a check for $50 (in ten years he's never missed), or Sue Marti, descendant of a MOH recipient whose $10 contribution every month through PayPal for ten years has kept us going. Others have shared in other critical ways:

• Chuck and Mary Schantag of the POW Network were equally critical to passage of the Stolen Valor Act and, as personal friends, have been a regular and sometimes-needed shoulder to cry on.

• Don Morfe, whose passion for finding and marking MOH gravesites is no less zealous than my web efforts...and who has contributed thousands of photos for the Gravesites section.

• Especially I am thankful to the three faithful corporate sponsors whose modest but necessary annual contributions as Official Sponsors for the last six to eight years made the difference. They are the Pueblo Chieftain, the Pueblo Medal of Honor Foundation, and the Colorado State Veterans Nursing Homes.

There are many ways to share and be a part of the work of HomeOfHeroes.com, and the many others who have provided information, photos, or contributed donations from time to time are all a part of a great team that has sustained us for ten years.

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