By Mark Fichter, Indiana Right to Life
Life News
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, thirty men from the small town of Bedford, Virginia, huddled close together in landing craft churning through the dark waters of the English Channel on a mission unlike any other the world had ever known. Their destination: a strip of sand known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
Most of the thoughts running through the minds of these young men are lost to eternity. Surely there was no lack of thought of loved ones back home—wives, mothers, sweethearts and friends— loved ones who were now half a world away, shielded from the ferocity of war by the sprawling Blue Ridge.
These were fighting men trained for this mission, and they carried no misconception about what they would face once the landing craft gate dropped into the salty foam. Yet they also knew that if this mission failed, every freedom they had enjoyed while growing up in America was in danger of being stripped away by those who would not rest until the United States was brought to her knees in submission.
As the shells ripped through the steel plating of the landing craft, before they even reached the beach, the cries of the first casualties underscored for these men that this would indeed be a very rough day.
For many, it would be their last day on this earth.
Of the thirty men from Bedford, Virginia, who hit the beach that day, nineteen died within minutes of the initial assault by Allied forces. These were not mere statistics of war, they were men like Wallace Carter, Nick Gillaspie, John Reynolds and Grant Yopp. They were young men who would never come home, men who sacrificed it all so that the folks back home could continue to worship freely, speak their minds about tyrants and friends alike, and pursue the American dream.
In the years that followed that awful day on Omaha Beach, those few Bedford men who survived never fully escaped the trauma of that day. Before he passed away, the last of the “Bedford Boys”, Ray Nance, said of that June day so long ago, “I never really got over it, and I’m not sure if I ever will.”
Bedford, Virginia, whose population in 1944 was about 3,200, is now remembered by a smaller and smaller number of Americans as the community that proportionally suffered the nation’s severest D-Day losses, fact memorialized by National D-Day Memorial that stands there yet today.
The Bedford memorial is just one of thousands that dot the American landscape today in silent testimony to the steep price that has been paid so that you and I can enjoy the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can find these memorials in places like Arlington National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and on just about every courthouse square in America.
Freedom isn’t free. And it must be defended. This is our legacy as Americans.America is now locked in a struggle to determine whether these freedoms will remain the hallmark of who we really are as a nation. The freedoms we so often take for granted are just as much in jeopardy as the day when our nation suffered thousand of casualties in the D-Day invasion that shifted the tide in World War II.
Nowhere is this assault on our freedoms more clearly seen than the HHS mandate that forces every church, ministry and business to provide coverage for abortion-causing drugs in direct violation of religious beliefs. Never before in American history has the government dared to trample such a deeply cherished fundamental right.
The truth is, an America stripped of her religious liberty is an America where all other liberties will fall to the scrap heap of history. Will we cease to be the City on a Hill to which the rest of the world streams for its best hope for freedom?
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