The photo depicting Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm and his family,
called “Burst of Joy,” goes on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Stirm was among 20 POWs from prison camps in North
Vietnam aboard the plane that landed at Travis AFB,
where a large crowd of family members turned up to
welcome their loved ones home.

Stirm, an Air Force fighter pilot shot down over Hanoi in
1967, had spent more than five years as a prisoner of the
Vietnam War.

“Burst of Joy” has appeared in numerous books and
exhibits and symbolizes for many the end of the divisive
Vietnam War—which claimed some 58,000 American lives
and the dawn of new life after a dark period.

Stirm retired from the United States Air
Force as a Colonel and lives in California.

Slava "Sal" Veder

The United States Military Academy—the first military school
in the United States, was founded by Congress for the purpose
of educating and training young men in the theory and practice
of military science. Located at West Point, New York, the U.S.
Military Academy is often simply known as West Point.

In Beirut, Lebanon, Islamic militants kidnapped American journalist
Terry Anderson and take him to the southern suburbs of the war-
torn city, where other Western hostages are being held in scattered dungeons under ruined buildings.

March 16, 1751, James Madison, drafter of the Constitution,
recorder of the Constitutional Convention, author of the
Federalist Papers and fourth president of the United States,
was born on a plantation in Virginia.       

Madison first distinguished himself as a student at the College
of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he successfully completed a four-year course of study in two years and, in 1769,
helped found the American Whig Society, the second literary and
debate society at Princeton (and the world), to rival the previously established Cliosophic Society.

After retiring from official political positions, Madison served
Thomas Jefferson’s beloved University of Virginia first as a
member of the board of visitors and then as rector. In 1938,
the State Teachers College at Harrisonburg, Virginia, was
renamed in Madison’s honor as Madison College; in 1976,
it became James Madison University.

The constitutional convention in Virginia.