Wilmer McLean took a break every day from his thriving grocery business and walked across the brown floorboards of his store, outside to a large, red wooden bench to watch the passenger train speed through the small railroad town of Manassas, Virginia.
McLean could hear the whistle blow as the northbound locomotive entered the town precisely at 1:13 p.m. He could set his watch by it.
However, in the first battle of the Civil War on July 21, 1861, with one loud boom of cannon, McLean’s peaceful world changed forever. The black locomotives now brought soldiers to the town, Union and Confederate, and onto his farm just beyond the outskirts of the corporation.
As the artillery roared near a small creek called Bull Run, Confederate reinforcements quickly arrived from Staunton and the Shenandoah Valley by railroad, changing the course of the battle.
According to historians, a brigade of Virginians under the command of the relatively unknown brigadier general from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, stood its ground, which resulted in Jackson receiving his famous nickname, “Stonewall”.
As the guns grew still, McLean became visibly angry. Fearing for his life and the lives of his family, he packed his wagon and moved about 45 miles east of Bedford to Appomattox, Virginia, a small town safely nestled amid the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, far away from the armaments of war.
McLean, like anyone living in the South, had no way of knowing that four years later, another battle would take place on his property. After the ground cooled from day-long combat at Appomattox, Generals Lee and Grant dismounted their horses, entered McLean’s parlor, and signed the surrender documents ending the Civil War in April, 1865.
Virginia is rich in military history. Mountain towns scattered throughout the Commonwealth, Staunton was one such town and Bedford another, have long provided soldiers, essentially citizen-soldiers, for our country dating back centuries. Today, the Virginia militias and National Guard units are without peer.
On a drizzly, foggy morning of June 6, 1944, the Stonewall Brigade returned to battle. The men from Staunton and Lexington were the first Americans to land on the sandy beaches of Normandy. Although they seized Omaha Beach, scores of young men from the Shenandoah Valley still lie in the American Cemetery inside the tiny village of St. Laurent, France.
In 1944, Bedford, Virginia was a town like thousands of other small towns across America; 3,200 people lived in Bedford, going about their lives best they could under the most difficult wartime circumstances.
The Bedford National Guard unit, called to active duty, was also at Normandy. Thirty soldiers, 19 and 20 years old, landed on the white beaches of France. Nineteen of them were killed, and two more died later during the Normandy campaign.
These were boys, really, who just two years earlier played on their high school basketball team, mowed yards for spending money, and double dated at the movies.
Then, at Omaha Beach, the young Virginians jumped, swam, ran, and crawled to the cliffs. They faced over 200 yards of beach before reaching the first cover offering any protection. When it was over, more than 4,000 were dead.
Only nine soldiers from Bedford survived. Proportionally, the Town of Bedford suffered the nation’s severest D-Day losses.
Forty years later, President Ronald Reagan remembered the boys from Staunton and Bedford, and others like them, when he spoke of the sacrifices made by every member of the military, and those who gave their lives, in all of our wars, for our country. “The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. But most of them were boys when they died.
“And they gave up two lives — the one they were living, and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything, for our country, for us.”
The weather was warm and humid on June 6, 2001, when I had the honor to stand at Crenshaw Street at Bypass 460 in Bedford, and hear President George W. Bush dedicate the D-Day Memorial sitting on a hill high above the town in the foothills.
On Friday April 28, 2017 the people of another small town, Wilmington, Ohio, will come together again to send-off troops boarding a plane. They won’t be boarding transport aircraft, or troop ships heading to a foreign land.
Instead, these men and women of Clinton County will be proudly climbing the steps of the Honor Flight, which will take them to Washington, D.C. There they will be rightfully honored, revered, and thanked for their military service, not just during World War II, but in the Korean and Vietnam wars as well.
Maybe you will bring food for the veterans, perhaps stand quietly waving a small American flag, or silently think about those who lost their lives in the sand, in the jungle, and the frozen plains of a cold and hostile land.
Come to the send-off. Our veterans deserve our support.
Pat Haley is a Clinton County Commissioner.
