Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful

and worthy of our love.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one Friends.

The morning dawned sunny but breezy in southeastern Ohio on Saturday August 9th 2014. In a small town of

Cambridge the Guernsey County seat traffic was stopped at the point of Highland and Wheeling

Avenues downtown in front of the brand new Cambridge Municipal Building.

The city band was warming up. Uniformed veterans were taking their places among the citizens gathered there.

Passers by, drawn in by neighborliness and love of country,

paused to join the growing congregation.

The center of attention was a stone bench,

being dedicated in memory of one of Guernsey County's

most decorated fallen soldiers.

Carl Ross Harbin Jr.

An Army Special Forces medic who gave his life for his country

half a century ago in the Vietnam War.

Carl grew up on the south side of Cambridge.

He was a member of the Beckett Avenue Methodist Church

and the Cambridge Eagles Lodge.

His friends recall him as a quiet, smart, kind-hearted athletic boy.

They played basketball with him year round in the alley behind David McCauley's house.

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