By Mallory Mattingly
At 101-years-old, World War II veteran Irving Locker became a songwriter, sharing his thoughts about what freedom really means.
Some of the lyrics to his song, “If Freedom Was Free,” read, “If freedom was free, there wouldn’t be a mountain of metal and men under Normandy.”
In an interview with FOX & FRIENDS, he opened up about his experience fighting on the beaches of Normandy in 1944.
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“These two [John and Heidi Bulford, who sing on the track] allowed me to tell the story that people have to know. Very few people know about the story of living through a war the way we did,” Locker said.
He explained that the lyrics of the song were inspired by a book someone in his battalion wrote.
“It is all facts, and I didn’t write the book. It’s absolutely there for people to see,” Locker said. “The gun was nine and a half tons, 10,000 pounds as far as the gun is concerned. The barrel was 15 feet long. Each shell that we fired was three feet tall and weighed 45 pounds. Before computers, we could shoot at a plane 25,000 feet up in the air and go through a tank army with piercing shells like a piece of glass.”
“We were picked as the only 90-millimeter battalion to go in on Utah Beach for D-Day to protect the men, the ships, and everything we could by the way we could fire, the way we could shoot, the stance,” he continued. “We even got to the point where we saved troops from annihilation with the French being our friends. When they captured our Americans and surrounded them, they would let us know when we could fire five miles out and direct my firing — go higher, go lower — to that point. And we saved troops from annihilation.”
“Now, I have a book that I was issued, written by somebody in our battalion to the point of every single day of the war of just our battalion,” Locker concluded. “Starting when we went in, right to the point of deactivation. So I could tell you every single day pretty much what we did — how many men were killed, how many men suffered, how many men were hospitalized — and all of the other things that we refer to in our everyday speech today because of the book.”
“If Freedom Was Free” was released by Big Machine Label Group and CreatiVets, a Nashville-based nonprofit.
“I have to talk about things like that,” Locker told the AP of the song’s message. “I got nothing to gain. But people have to know and appreciate the fact that they’re living because of men who died. It comes from the heart, not the lips.”
“To be very honest with you, I was never conscious of God until the war,” he said. “But I came so close to dying that I learned how to thank God and use the simple phrase ‘But for the grace of God go I.’”
Though becoming a songwriter at 101 surprised Locker, his ability to share his story will continue to keep the legacy of freedom alive in America.
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