Memorial Day observance honors men, women, who made the ultimate sacrifice
By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette / WBRT Radio
The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts salute after raising the flag from half-staff at the end of Monday’s Memorial Day observance at the Bardstown City Cemetery. Click to enlarge.
Monday, May 29, 2017 — Those who gathered for the annual Memorial Day observance at the city cemetery were greeted with beautiful skies and a light breeze Memorial Day morning.
The event brings veterans, local American Legion and VFW post members, and families of veterans to gather around the cemetery flagpole to remember the veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country’s safety and security.
Bardstown Mayor Dick Heaton thanked the veterans and families of veterans who come out each Memorial Day, and he thanked organizers who make sure the observance takes place each year.
State Rep. Chad McCoy explained that remembering the sacrifices of those defending our country is critically important. He said that he and his wife and family traveled last year to the beaches of Normandy — the beaches that were the focus of the June 6, 1944 D-Day Allied invasion of France.
“I wanted them to see it,” McCoy said of his kids. “I wanted them to walk on the beaches and understand what their grandfathers had fought for, and what they had fought against.”
McCoy said they walked Omaha Beach, saw the Nazi bunkers still in place. Overlooking the beach is now what looks like beautiful pasture land. But that pasture land is pockmarked by craters from the bombs that fell on D-Day, he explained.
But all of that paled in comparison to the American cemetery atop the same cliffs. The cemetery contained row after row of crosses and Stars of David marking the graves of U.S. soldiers who died that day.
“Its so odd to think that here you are in this peaceful, tranquil place, that was — in some of your lifetimes — probably one of the most destructive place on Earth,” he said.
On D-Day, those young men were asked to do something they knew might require them to give their lives, he said.
State Rep. Chad McCoy speaks to the crowd at Monday’s Memorial Day observance in the Bardstown Cemetery. Click to enlarge.
“Yet they did it willing, and the reason they did was because they believed in something bigger than the individual,” he said. “They believed in that spirit, that something, that is America.”
It’s the same kind of spirit President Calvin Coolidge referred to in his comments on Memorial Day 1923, he said.
“Peace comes only through the establishment of the supremacy of the forces of good. That way lies only through sacrifice. It was that the people of our country might live in knowledge of the truth that these, our countrymen, are dead. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
“This spirit is not dead, it is the most vital thing in America. It did not flow from any act of government. It is the spirit of the people themselves.”
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