The Cost of Freedom!

This Post first Ran in June of 2005!

Freedom Is Not Free!

A few days ago, I had the great good fortune to have the opportunity presented to me to speak to a congregation of Southern Baptists on Memorial Day weekend. It was their annual Memorial Day Service, held each year on the Sunday closest to Memorial Day Monday.

It was a modest sized congregation with a very good representation of the community. At one point the pastor asked that all veterans stand and announce their branch of service, years served, and anything they’d like to say about their service.

That’s when the tears started.

Memories began to flood back into the minds of the veterans thru out the congregation. Veterans of the merchant Marine, the Army, The Navy, The Marines, the Air Force, the National Guard, and all the Reserves. As men remembered the sacrifice of their best buddy, a brother, a father, or even their own sacrifice, hearts were pieced with pain and the emotions would not be held back.

It quickly became clear that the memories so long buried were just beneath the surface. The passion men and women felt for the veteran was real, deep, and precious. The price wars have cost this nation is real and lasting. The scars are deeply embedded, oftimes, in our subconscious, but always there.

We’re a country of free people who know the cost of war. Yet, America will willing shed her blood and the treasure of her youth to secure freedom for oppressed peoples anywhere on earth.

Freedom is not free. As I sat listening to the other veterans tell of their sacrifices and the sacrifices of those from their families, the cost was brought home. The cost was high. Here, in this small farming community, in North Carolina, the pain was still there. And it will be there. Three young men rose and spoke of their service to their country in Gulf War One, and now the current Iraq War, and Afghanistan. More pain. More memories to be spoken of on Memorial Days in the future.

The thing that keeps coming back to me is the old time worn expression: “War solves nothing!” It is a lie. War does solve things. We’re a free people today as a result of several wars. War put Hitler away. War stopped the massacre of the Jews. War stopped the Japanese march across the Pacific enslaving people as they went. War maintained the freedom of the South Korean people by driving the North Korean army back across the 38th Parallel and stopped their allies the Red Chinese. The US still stands guard at that border to this day. War would have stopped the march of communism in Vietnam had the Mainstream Media, in this country, not whipped up anti-war fever in this country and played right into the hands of the communists in Southeast Asia. The US troops did not lose that war; they were not allowed to win it. And the blame is laid right at the feet of the American Left and their willing accomplices in the Mainstream Media.

You see, as hard as it is to grasp, there are people in this free country would feel that nothing is worth war. Those folks are free and kept free by better men than themselves. Men died to give them the freedom to protest the US involvement in wars of liberation all over the world. While they themselves refuse to understand that with out the freedom granted them by the US Soldier they would, this day, be living out their lives in slavery. They refuse to understand that freedom is not free. Somebody paid for it… and continues to pay for it. These are the people who would bow their heads and bend their neck to allow the chains of slavery to be fastened on them... rather than risk their lives to live free. Pathetic!

War does solve things. But, it brings pain, and sharp memories, which linger just below the surface in our hearts and minds.

Is freedom worth it? Of course it is! Man’s longing for freedom can never be quenched. This great experiment we call America was forged in war. The Revolutionary War and the War Between the States. War is a crucible. It will either make a nation, or break a nation. America is welded together from having been through that crucible.

Today we find ourselves as Americans caught up in another world war. For lack of a better name we call it the War on Terror. This is an open-ended war. No end is in sight; if ever there will be an end. You would be hard pressed to find the front lines. Today we are concentrated in the Middle East. That is the public war. The private war, or the war we don’t see, is all around the globe. Men with Presidential pardons, already secured, are hunting down the perpetrators of this war of terror and eliminating them, one at a time, in diverse places. For this is a war mostly fought in the shadows. It is a continuous search and destroy mission… search out the terrorists and destroy them wherever they are found.

Freedom is not free. It never has been. It never will be. America fights because she must. For America will be free! As President Kennedy said, “No matter the cost.” We have no choice. No choice, that is, if we hope to remain free.

“Longstreet”