Bedford

On the last day of my week-long car trip I was in Virginia and went to two reverential sites in south central Virginia (plus the UVA campus where two of my children were born and I earned a law degree in my late-thirties) that defined our country.  The first was Bedford, a small farming community of 2500 souls where unknown to its inhabitants, in a terrible half-hour on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944, D-Day, twenty of their sons were cut down in the first wave of the Allied assault on Hitler's Fortress Europa.  It would be a full month before the residents of this sleepy town would know, in three terrible days in July when the War Department released casualty lists from the battle and sent telegrams to the affected families that their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers had been among the 80% carnage rate of the first wave on that beach during the assault, the true cost of our freedom.

That was a different generation, a breed hardened as children who often went hungry during the Great Depression where 25% of Americans were out of work, and payment for services and goods were done in a barter economy.  My grandfather in Colorado, a dentist, took chickens in payment for dental work in his small farming community there, Doc Fox, and for all I know and highly suspect, no payment at all, only a promise, very often fulfilled later, or not.

This is the America I love.  When I was a young boy, practically everyone's household had a veteran of WW2, tightlipped, many having seen the elephant, like my father did in the Pacific War, learning there in the crucible that having to depend unthinkingly and instantaneously upon boys from Brooklyn, Birmingham, Boise and Bath for their very survival, that American greatness depended upon cooperation with all other Americans who were there and learned the same lesson, leaving out the lunatic fringe who never went which unfortunately, we see influential in a commanding way as "victims" today.

Heroes, those twenty two or more men from Bedford, (more Bedford Boys died during the Bocage Campaign in Normandy).  The National D-Day Memorial is there in Bedford, symbolizing American greatness, belying the notion of American Carnage as espoused recently by people who never knew or forgot our greatness.