National Medal of Honor Museum opens its doors

It has been years, decades even, in the making but on Tuesday, the National Medal of Honor Museum opened its doors to the public in Arlington, Texas.

“Our mission is pretty simple,” Chris Cassidy, CEO and president of the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, told Military Times. “Our aim is to inspire Americans through stories like Tommy’s [Norris] of courage, sacrifice, service to others, service over self, through the interaction of those stories in the museum to bring that into one’s own life.”

The 100,000-square-foot museum boasts exhibits such as “More Than a Medal,” which explores the “ordinary lives” of medal recipients, like Marine Kyle Carpenter, and an interactive display featuring interviews with the 61 Medal of Honor recipients living today.

Since its inception in 1861 during the American Civil War, the Medal of Honor has been awarded to less than 4,000 men and one woman among the 40 million Americans who have served in the United States armed forces.

Despite the award’s prestige, however, some are less familiar with the Medal of Honor’s history and its recipients.

“We want to flip that around,” Cassidy said. “We want people to walk out of the museum experience and have connected in a personal way, because people, human beings, like to hear stories of other human beings.”

While the National Medal of Honor Museum is not the first of its kind — the Medal of Honor Museum at Patriots Point, South Carolina, was designated by Congress as an official National Medal of Honor Memorial site in 1999 and is operated by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society — the scale of the museum and the stories it shares is unprecedented.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his family donated the first $20 million to get the staggering $300 million project started, with the museum site just a stone’s throw from the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

Thirty-two of the recipients traveled down to Arlington to mark the museum’s grand opening, with Medal of Honor recipient and Navy veteran Thomas “Tommy” Norris telling Military Times that the museum “is an incredible avenue to be able to give to the American public those values that are held within the people that have served in order to receive this medal.”

For Norris, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his 1972 actions in Quang Tri, Vietnam, these values aren’t only displayed in the military.

“Individual recipients don’t wear the medal for themselves. It’s for our teammates and for those that never returned, the ones we lost,” Norris said. “But what it took to do that mission are the values and the inspiration we want to impart on all the people that are able to come here and see this incredible museum.

“There are a lot of people out there that are heroes. A lot of people out there have done amazing things and are not always recognized. But they don’t need to be. They can be self-satisfied with having the inspiration, the commitment to achieve whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve.”