Listen and Watch Tim McGraw’s tribute to America’s Fallen Heroes…”If You’re Reading This.”
Dear TMLC Friends and Supporters:
From Lexington and Valley Forge, to Normandy, Korea, and Vietnam and now to Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s military forces have bravely fought for Freedom and in defense of our Nation. Memorial Day is a time to remember our brave fighting men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation with their very lives.
“So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching.” [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. at an address delivered for Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH]
Let us not only take the time to remember the heroic sacrifices of our military throughout our nation’s history, but also to remember the heroic sacrifices our combat men and women are making in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Let us take this time to pray for our troops who have died in battle, and for their loved ones who still mourn their great loss.
Let us also pray for our troops who are in harms way today. This Memorial Day I close with a poem which reminds us of the true price of freedom.
Freedom Is Not Free
I watched the flag pass by one day.
It fluttered in the breeze.
A young Marine saluted it,
And then he stood at ease.
I looked at him in uniform
So young, so tall, so proud,
He’d stand out in a crowd.
I thought how many men like him
had fallen through the years.
How many had died on foreign soil?
How many mothers’ tears?
How many pilots’ planes shot down?
How many died at sea?
How many foxholes were soldiers’ graves?
No, freedom is not free.
I heard the sound of Taps one night,
when everything was still
I listened to the bugler play
And felt a sudden chill.
I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant “Amen”
When a flag had draped a coffin
Of brother or a friend.
I thought of all the children,
Of mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands
with interrupted lives.
I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea
Of unmarked graves in Arlington…
No, freedom is not free.
Author Unknown
May God continue to bless America.
Sincerely yours,
Richard Thompson
President and Chief Counsel
Thomas More Law Center