Category Archives: Virginians at War

A Native Virginian Hero

Posted on October 8, 2023 by | 14 comments

Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Puller (USMC)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

A family plot in the cemetery of a church in the Northern Neck completed in 1714 is the final resting place of a Virginia native who was one of the United States’ modern heroes.

A highway historic marker caught my eye this weekend while I was exploring the Northern Neck on my way back home from a conference in the Newport News area and I decided to visit the grave site of a man whom I had heard much about:  Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller.

Puller was the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps. He was awarded five Navy Crosses (second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor for the Navy), the only person to receive that many. In addition to the Navy Crosses, he was awarded the Army equivalent, the Distinguished Service Medal, as well as the Army Silver Medal. Along with those medals and other awards, he was awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded in battle. Continue reading →

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Posted in Uncategorized, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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The Enduring Value of Arlington’s Endangered Monument to Reconciliation

Posted on August 29, 2023 by | 51 comments

The Confederate Memorial in Arlington.
(Arlington National Cemetery; photo by Rachel Larue)

by Donald Smith

Jim Webb, former U.S. Senator from Virginia, former Navy Secretary, and certified badass (Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts from his service as a Marine officer in Vietnam) grabbed quite a bit of attention last week.  On August 18 he called for the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery to be spared.  You can read his commentary here, if you have a Wall Street Journal subscription (or have some free articles left.)  Here’s a link to a no-paywall article on Webb’s piece.  Here’s a link to the most prominent criticism I’ve seen of Webb’s piece, from Civil War historian Kevin Levin. 

Webb’s commentary points out an important and, until now, mostly ignored repercussion of Congress’ blanket approval of the Naming Commission’s recommendations:  it diminishes our nation’s soft power.  That makes it harder for our military and diplomats to achieve our nation’s goals overseas without having to resort to coercion or violence.  Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Defense, Democracy and Western Civilization, Leadership, Politics, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Town of Bedford Honors June 6 D-Day

Posted on June 7, 2023 by | 11 comments

by Scott Dreyer

World War II saw conflict across Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the oceans of the world. However, the charming Central Virginia town of Bedford is the site of the famous D-Day Memorial. Bedford sent 35 men to land at Normandy, France.

The memorial honors the 19 local boys who died on June 6, 1944, in the heroic struggle to liberate Europe from Nazism. Before the end of that campaign, four more Bedford boys lost their lives. Bedford’s mind-numbing 65 percent death rate means that on a per capita basis, the town sacrificed more residents than any other American community in that epic fight between good and evil.

Because of the fog of war and poor communication then, horrific news of those casualties did not begin to come into Bedford until July 17th, a month and a half after D-Day, when the first 11 deaths were reported. Reports of the other deaths trickled in over the following days and weeks.

Notably, since telegraph messages then were sent from town to town, news of Bedford’s losses first came through the Western Union telegraph office in Roanoke. One Roanoker had the terrible task at work of sending these five words to the Bedford office: “Good morning, we have casualties.”

“The youngest one was just about to turn 21 and the oldest was 30,” said Linda Parker, co-director of the Company A Bedford Boys Tribute Center.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin spoke at Tuesday’s commemoration (June 6th) at the D-Day Memorial to honor the 79th anniversary of that event. Remembering the sacrifices of those who went before, the Town of Bedford has festooned the lampposts along Main Street with banners featuring the names and photos of those Bedford Boys who never made it home from WWII, along with U.S. and French flags, since the site of the landings, the Normandy beaches, are in Northwest France.

As our state and nation face today’s many challenges, we can take hope and encouragement from the bravery, patriotism, and sacrifice of those who have gone before.

Republished with permission from The Roanoke Star.

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Posted in Virginians at War

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Arlington National Cemetery

Posted on May 27, 2023 by | 12 comments

U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser / Arlington National Cemetery

by Robin Beres

Virginia is brimming with famous and consequential landmarks and tourist sites. From the Historic Triangle to St. John’s Church in Richmond, to great beaches, mountains, and countless old plantation homes, vineyards, and breweries, there is a lot to see and do in the commonwealth. It’s little wonder that Virginia is ranked No. 6 in most visited states in the U.S. according to the World Atlas.

While there is much to see in Virginia that is upbeat and fun, there are also solemn and sobering experiences to take in as well. Some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place in Spotsylvania Court House, the Wilderness, and Chancellorsville. Both Revolutionary War and Civil War victories happened in our beloved state.

It is important that we all take time to appreciate the sacrifices so many Americans serving in uniform have made to ensure our freedoms. That is the very reason we have this Memorial Day weekend.

While by no means a tourist site, Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) is one of the most visited places in Virginia. Located just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The national cemetery is built on the grounds of a plantation that once belonged to Mary Anna Custis Lee, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The family vacated the home shortly after the Civil War began. Continue reading →

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Posted in Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Naming Commission is Stripping History

Posted on January 25, 2023 by | 46 comments

by Donald Smith

The week of January 16, 2023, was a big one for Virginia heritage issues in the Richmond area. Connor Williams, the chief historian for the Congressional Naming Commission (CNC) came to the American Civil War Museum to explain and defend the commission’s sweeping recommendations toward, and its disparagement of, Confederate memories on Department of Defense installations.

That week also saw the announcement that the Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond would be renamed as part of a campaign to strip “racist history from military facilities,” according to a story in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

In the article, Sen. Mark Warner (D), a former governor of Virginia, praised the renaming. “Naming decisions should honor the patriotism of our veterans,” he said.

So, by highlighting that particular part of Warner’s statement, the Stars and Stripes apparently thinks that, in Mark Warner’s eyes, Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire and the Virginia soldiers he treated during the Civil War were neither patriots nor veterans.

It is time for the General Assembly to act. The GA needs to convene a hearing to explore the CNC’s recommendations and let the CNC justify them. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Defense, Government Oversight, Leadership, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Leave Arlington’s Confederate Memorial Intact

Posted on January 19, 2023 by | 52 comments

Cherry trees bloom in Jackson Circle around the Confederate Monument in Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery, April 7, 2015, in Arlington, Va. The Confederate Monument was unveiled June 4, 1914, according to the ANC website. (Arlington National Cemetery photo by Rachel Larue)

by Phil Leigh

Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial should remain intact. Although four of the first seven cotton states arguably seceded from the union over slavery, they did not cause the Civil War. They had no purpose to overthrow the federal government. After forming the seven state Confederacy in February 1861, they promptly sent commissioners to Washington to “preserve the most friendly relations” with the truncated Union. Instead of letting the cotton states depart in peace, the North’s resolve to force them back into the Union caused the war.

With half of the military-aged white men of the eventual 11-state Confederacy, the four states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas only joined the original seven after President Lincoln called upon them to provide volunteers to force the first seven back into the Union. In response to a telegram from Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton directing that Virginia provide her quota of such volunteers, Governor John Letcher replied that his state would not comply and concluded: “You have chosen to inaugurate Civil War….”

On the eve of the war, Northerners and Southerners differed on their relative loyalties to the federal and state governments. According to historians Edward Channing and Eva Moore, Northerners had

the general opinion that the Union was sovereign, and the states were part of it…. The idea that the people of the United States formed one nation had been reinforced by the coming of immigrants from abroad. These people had no conception of a ‘state’ or a sentimental attachment to a ‘state.’ They had come to America to better their condition….

By mostly settling in the North, they reinforced the Northerners’ belief that they owed their loyalty to the Union first and only secondarily to the state. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Government Oversight, Political Influence, Race and race relations, Transparency, Uncategorized, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Jamestown Settlement – A Flawless Weaving of American History

Posted on October 11, 2022 by | 39 comments

Christy Coleman, Executive Director, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation

by James C. Sherlock

Sunday, on a brilliant fall day in Hampton Roads, my wife and I went on an outing.

Despite having lived in Virginia for many decades, neither of us had ever been to Jamestown.

We all know the outlines of the story. Jamestown was founded in 1607 as a commercial venture by British investors, the Virginia Company. It was ill-conceived and badly executed, but survived, if barely.

We know, or think we do, about John Smith and Pocahontas. The arrival of African slaves. The beginnings of the General Assembly. Bacon’s Rebellion. The abandonment of the settlement in 1699 when the capitol was moved to Williamsburg.

It turned out that neither of us knew enough about Jamestown to avoid being constantly surprised and educated during a visit to Jamestown Settlement, a living history museum presented by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF).

What makes that museum very special is the way the JYF has woven together the stories of early Jamestown:

  • the 1607 voyage of three ships and 104 colonists under the command of Captain Christopher Newport;
  • the managers hired by the Virginia Company, then royal appointees from 1624 when the settlement became a colony, and wayward sons of the well-to-do like Nathanial Bacon;
  • the other European immigrants, mostly indentured servants;
  • the indigenous peoples; and
  • Africans, both slave (starting in 1619) and free.

The museum presents not only their history, but their humanity. Continue reading →

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Posted in Virginia history, Virginia Law, Virginians at War

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It’s a Memorial, Not a Racist Ideology

Posted on October 2, 2022 by | 30 comments

by Carol J. Bova

Accounts from lawyers, reporters, pundits and other outsiders have severely distorted the debate over the Confederate memorial in Mathews County.

To The Washington Post, the controversy is about the ”enduring power of the Civil War’s legacy.”

To the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs and Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher, LLP, writing on behalf of the local NAACP, it’s an endorsement of white supremacy. “Confederate monuments were intended to assert that white supremacy would remain a dominant force of social control.”

To Mathews families whose ancestors never came home from the war, the monument in front of the county courthouse provides an enduring connection to their ancestors – a love and commemoration of family. The monument is not a political statement. 

The controversy originated with a proposal before the Mathews Board of Supervisors to deed the land underneath the statue to a private preservation group. The County neither commissioned nor paid for the memorial. It did allow its placement on the corner of the Courthouse Green in 1912 because, at that time, there were no paved roads in the County, and many were impassable in bad weather. The business district was centered near the Courthouse Green, so when families came to shop, the location of the memorial was accessible to pay respect to the Mathews war dead. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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The Robert E. Lee of Appomattox

Posted on October 2, 2022 by | 36 comments

by Kenneth G. Everett

Adversity is the first path to truth.
Lord Byron, DON JUAN, Canto XII, Stanza 50

Few things in life reveal more clearly the true character of a man than his response to the circumstances of defeat and failure. The deepest impulses of the soul emerge when cherished hopes collapse and undertakings of much labor, sacrifice, and suffering end in ruin. All of this we see in Robert E. Lee at his surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April of 1865.

Given the severely reduced and depleted state of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by April 1865, and short of the useless sacrifice of this remnant of faithful veterans in a defiant last stand against Grant, Lee saw no option but that of surrendering the army. This exigency of circumstances, however, did not put Lee under the necessity of making peace.

On the eve of Lee’s meeting with Grant at the McLean house near Farmville, Virginia, Gen. E. Porter Alexander, Lee’s Chief of Artillery and one of his most gifted officers, passionately implored him to order the army to “scatter in the woods & bushes & either to rally upon Gen. Johnston in North Carolina, or to make their way, each man to his own state, with arms, & to support his governor,” rather than to surrender, arguing to Lee that “the men that have fought under you for four years have got the right to ask you to spare us the mortification of having you ask Grant for terms. . . .” Continue reading →

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Posted in Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Marginalizing Another Dissident

Posted on July 18, 2022 by | 115 comments

Ann McLean

by James A. Bacon

The Washington Post recently published a story about a gubernatorial appointment to one of Virginia’s more obscure commissions: the state Board of Historic Resources, which oversees state historic-site designations. The article focused on Governor Glenn Youngkin’s selection of Ann McLean, who believes that Virginia’s heritage is “under attack,” and has condemned the destruction of Confederate monuments as a “dangerous” rewriting of history.

Only three years ago, before the protests unleashed by the George Floyd protests, views on Confederate statues were radically different. A special commission appointed to study the statues on Monument Ave. was debating what to do with the monument which, even before George Floyd’s death, some considered a problem. The committee was leaning then toward “recontextualizing” or “reinterpreting” the statues to reflect the fact that the public understanding of the monuments had changed since they were erected more than a century ago. It was a perfectly acceptable position to argue at that time, as McLean did, that these magnificent works of public art should be preserved in place.

Today, some paint that view as racist. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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The President Had Somewhere Important to Be

Posted on August 31, 2021 by | 72 comments

Credit: Getty Images

by James C. Sherlock

The caption of the photo:

“US President Joe Biden looks down alongside First Lady Jill Biden as they attend the dignified transfer of the remains of a fallen service member at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, August, 29, 2021, one of the 13 members of the US military killed in Afghanistan last week.”

I watched.  I am sure I had lots of company.

  • Virginia Veterans — nearly 730,215 — one out of 10 adults.
  • Virginia active duty (89,303) and reserve military (25,977) = 115,280
  • Virginia Army National Guard 7,500 soldiers and 46 armories
  • Virginia Air National Guard 192nd Fighter Wing at Langley AFB Hampton – approximately 200.

In an unblinking story for The Washington Post, Matt Viser exposed a failure of leadership and understanding of the moment that was a direct insult to all Americans.

The President was there to representing us all. He shamed us. Continue reading →

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Posted in Defense, Governance, National Security, Virginians at War

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Virginia Beach and Afghanistan

Posted on August 14, 2021 by | 84 comments

by James C. Sherlock

It was never a Navy war.

But in this Navy town, it was brought literally home to us again and again. We are home to nearly half of the Navy SEALs, including SEAL Team 6.

Something like 4,000 to 5,000 total plus their families.

SEALs are America’s special operations forces specially trained for undersea, coastal, river and swamp operations. They train on our beaches, in our swamps, bays and ocean. Some of us can hear their live gunfire at night.

Folks in the Navy flight paths hear big transports take off at 4:00 in the morning, guess that’s them going God knows where, wish them well, and try to go back to sleep.

About 15 years ago, I went through physical rehab in a civilian facility here with one of them, a Chief Petty Officer who you would not have recognized as a sailor. He and I were there for different types of injuries.

I was retired and rehabbing a knee operated on for arthritis. He was rehabbing muscle damage from a bullet wound. Affected his trigger finger. Continue reading →

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Posted in Children and families, Defense, National Security, Virginians at War

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