HISTORY: The Purple Heart Memorial Highway

By Cynthia Moe

"But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother."
—From Shakespeare’s King Henry V, “St. Crispian’s Day” speech.

Whenever the military awards a Purple Heart, the honor is bittersweet. The medal is only given in cases where a soldier has been wounded or killed by enemy action. The Purple Heart cannot be earned for skill or valor—it only, and always, represents the shedding of blood. For the soldier who receives the medal—or the soldier’s family in the case of a posthumous award—it signifies that the soldier is part of a warrior elite, an exclusive fellowship of pain and loss endured in the service of protecting America and the cause of freedom.

The Purple Heart Memorial Highway is a nationwide memorial dedicated to the honor and memory of all combat-wounded veterans. The highway originates in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and runs through the twenty states that have designated parts of their highway systems as Purple Heart Memorial Highways. In August 2006, Minnesota joined their ranks, designating most of the 107-mile stretch of Highway 371, which connects Little Falls in the south to Cass Lake in the north, as Purple Heart Memorial Highway.

Bill Wroolie is a Brainerd resident and veteran who received a Purple Heart after being wounded in Vietnam in 1969. He is also a past commander of the national Military Order of the Purple Heart. In 2005 he asked Minnesota State Senator Paul Koering to introduce a bill that would honor recipients of the Purple Heart by designating 371 as part of the nationwide memorial. It quickly gained support. A year later, Wroolie joined members of Brainerd’s McComas/Lunde Military Order of the Purple Heart Chapter 194, along with many proud veterans, in officially declaring Highway 371 as a Purple Heart Memorial Highway.

There are half a million Purple Heart recipients alive in our country today and, of those, forty thousand have received the medal for combat injuries incurred in Afghanistan and Iraq. Statewide, twelve thousand veterans have received a Purple Heart. There are eighty-seven members of Brainerd’s McComas/Lunde Chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart Chapter No. 194. According to Wroolie, the Purple Heart Memorial Highway project has grown out of a desire to remind people that there is a high cost associated with protecting freedom at home and abroad.

The History of the Purple Heart

“The road to glory in a patriot army
and a free country is thus open to all.”
—General George Washington, in his General Order describing the award of a Purple Heart, August 7, 1782

General George Washington issued the original orders describing the Badges of Military Merit, a heart fashioned from purple material and worn on the left breast. Washington himself honored three men with the precursor to the modern Purple Heart, for “unusual gallantry, fidelity, or essential service” in battle. The awards were given to Sergeant Elijah Churchill, Sergeant William Brown, and Sergeant Daniel Bissell, Jr.

At the close of the Revolution, Washington’s orders disappeared—for 150 years the medal and the honor that it bestowed were lost. It wasn’t until a search of records was being conducted in preparation for Washington’s bicentennial birthday celebration in 1932 that the order was rediscovered. A new Purple Heart medal was designed specifically to honor the soldier wounded or killed in the course of combat. The heart bears the profile of Washington and his coat of arms—the stars and stripes said to be the inspiration for the design of the American flag.