On the cold, rainy, miserable night of March 23, 1944, 23 members of Company B, 104th Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry Division, marched down a dirt road to a place called Averitt's Ferry, in northeast Wilson County, Tennessee. The men were part of the last exercise of the massive wartime maneuvers which took place in Middle Tennessee during World War II. The men boarded a small boat to practice a combat river crossing of the rain-swollen Cumberland River. As the boat, underpowered and overloaded, struggled against the powerful current, the outboard motor quit and the boat was swept downriver and capsized. Only two of the men made it to shore.

Military personnel and civilian volunteers combed the river and its banks for over a month, searching for the bodies of the lost men. One was found near Nashville, eighty miles downriver. Many of the oldtimers in this still-rural community still recall those days and the sad search for the missing men.

Today, seventy years afrer the Averitt's Ferry tragedy, public officials and citizens of Trousdale and Wilson counties held a memorial service to honor those 21 young men. Their names were read, a local group of WW2 reenactors in period uniforms fired a salute, taps was sounded by a lone bugler, and a sheriff's department patrol boat carried a wreath to midriver and dropped it into the water. It was a very moving ceremony.

Freedom ain't free by along shot. If the most we can do for those who have paid that price is to remember them and their sacrifice, we ought to do that, for at least a moment every day.

Catoosa