And here is some of what he wrote:  “I’ve never been afraid of death, but I know he is waiting at the corner...I’ve been trained to kill and to save, and so has everyone else.  I am frightened of what lays beyond the fog, and yet... do not mourn for me.  Revel in the life that I have died to give you...  But most of all, don’t forget that the Army was my choice.  Something that I wanted to do.  Remember I joined the Army to serve my country and inure that you are free to do what you want and to live your lives freely.”

Let me add that Private Markwell was among the first to see battle in Panama, and among the first to fall.  But he knew what he believed in.  He carried the idea we call America in his heart.

I began tonight speaking about the changes we’ve seen this past year.  There is a new world of challenges and opportunities before us.  And there is a need for leadership that only America can provide.

Nearly 40 years ago, in his last address to the Congress, President Harry Truman predicted such a time would come.  He said, “As our world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the Iron Curtain, then inevitably there will come a time of change within the Communist world.”  Today, that change is taking place.

For more than 40 years, America and its allies held Communism in check and insured that democracy would continue to exist.  And today, with Communism crumbling, our aim must be to insure democracy’s advance, to take the lead in forging peace and freedom’s best hope, a great and growing commonwealth of free nations.

And to the Congress and to all Americans, I say it is time to acclaim a new consensus at home and abroad, a common vision of the peaceful world we want to see.

Here in our own hemisphere it is time for all the people of the Americas, North and South, to live in freedom.

In the Far East and Africa, it’s time for the full flowering of free governments and free markets that have served the engine of progress.

It is time to offer our hand to the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe so that continent, for too long a continent divided, can see a future whole and free.

It’s time to build on our new relationship with the Soviet Union, to endorse and encourage a peaceful process of internal change toward democracy and economic opportunity.

We are in a period of great transition, great hope, and yet great uncertainty.  We recognize that the Soviet military threat in Europe is diminishing, but we see little change in Soviet strategic modernization.  And, therefore, we must sustain our own strategic offense modernization and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

But the time is right to move forward on a conventional arms control agreement to move us to more appropriate levels of military forces in Europe, a coherent defense program that insures the U.S. will continue to be a catalyst for peaceful change in Europe.  And I’ve consulted with leaders of NATO.  In fact I spoke by phone with President Gorbachev just today.