Major Al Cave ..... Imagine for a moment that you are an orphaned black child, abused by the grandmother who took you in, sent without justification to a brutal institution where you see other kids beaten and know you will be too, so you run away, onto the streets of New York City at the age of eleven, with no means of support, no safety net, no safe place to sleep, and hope seems too much to hope for.

Imagine at the age of 17, joining the U.S. Army, a segregated army, where you must not only do your duty, but know that your color keeps you separate, one step even below the defeated German soldiers, and that the ideals of freedom the we fought a world war over do not apply to you back home, where White officers believe that Blacks can’t fight, that they can’t see in the dark, that they lack the skills to fly a plane, or steer a boat, or fire an artillery piece, or understand the growing importance of electronics for a modern military. How wrong they were!

Despite all this, despite every barrier placed in your way, you pull yourself up through every enlisted rank, becoming an officer, becoming such an expert in the new and complex electronics and communications that you are in charge of the system for an entire division of more than 12,000 troops. You master both German and Japanese so well that you can speak the dialect of different regions of those countries as though you are a native speaker, and soon general officers are depending on you through the Korean Conflict, through the confrontation with the Soviet Union and into the Vietnam Conflict, where you fight not just the enemy of your country, but the enemies of racism and classicism within your countrymen, achieving the rank of Major, a field officer, just three steps below being a general yourself.

As a former officer in both the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Special Forces where I served on the general staff of a brigade, there is no doubt in my mind that in a truly American military free of racism for almost his entire military career, Al Cave would have become General Al Cave, and this country would have been a better place for that having happened.

And then Major Cave began a new chapter in his life, as an entrepreneur and businessman in New York City where he once walked as a homeless child of the streets. Soon he had more than 250 employees cleaning buildings including one at the World Trade Center conglomerate, with a monthly bottom line of more than a million dollars. The same focus, the same hard work and the same integrity again made him a remarkable American success story.

It is my honor and distinct privilege to assist in presenting the Second Annual Lifetime Achievement Award of the African American Club of Pasco to Major Al Cave: my superior officer, my friend, my brother in arms, my hero! Major Cave, front and center, sir!