Imagine driving through the heartland of Iowa when suddenly, a massive boulder catches your eye. These aren’t just any rocks; they’re the magnificent Freedom Rocks, painted by artist Ray “Bubba” Sorensen. Each vibrant mural is a powerful tribute, depicting local military heroes and iconic scenes of American sacrifice and valor. Bubba’s journey began with a simple yet profound mission: to use his art to say a heartfelt “thank you” to the brave men and women who have served our nation.
From a small Iowa town, Bubba never forgot the stories of how many Vietnam veterans were treated upon their return. Deeply moved by their sacrifices and profoundly impacted by films like Saving Private Ryan, he felt a powerful calling to honor those who served. What started as one humble mural on a graffiti-covered “rock” in rural Iowa has blossomed into a cherished, statewide project, creating lasting veteran tributes and inspiring monuments that remind us all of the enduring cost of freedom and the unwavering spirit of those who protect it.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:36 Speaker 2: Ray Bubba Sorensen was born in the heartland of America.
00:00:40 Speaker 3: So I was born in Creston, Iowa, and I grew up in the little town of Fontanelle, Iowa, about six hundred people. You know, I played about every sport, and I just had kind of your normal, generic high school or small-town upbringing before technology really hit.
00:00:58 Speaker 4: I guess.
00:01:02 Speaker 3: So, my Uncle Ted served in Vietnam as an AVCB, and, you know, most, most of the country knows that.
00:01:11 Speaker 4: You know, our Vietnam veterans,
00:01:13 Speaker 3: weren’t treated very well when they returned back from service, and they came home to a very ungrateful nation. And, you know, some were spat on, some were, you know, protested as they got off buses and planes, and a lot of those guys kind of hid their service or were ashamed of their service. And my mom told me about all that, and, you know, that never sat well with me. And then, of course, like, as I was growing up, movies like Rambo, TV shows like Tour of Duty, old, old shows, World War Two dramas like Combat. My mom would watch those with me, and although, you know, they were, you know, fictional, they were based on actual narratives of Vietnam veterans, World War Two veterans. So my mom was able to kind of illustrate to me the service and sacrifice of all these men and women, how much, especially our Korean, which is a forgotten war, and our Vietnam veterans were treated when they came back, and that just really stuck with me, you know. And as I grew up, I started to, I guess, parallel stories here.
00:02:11 Speaker 4: Become interested in art.
00:02:13 Speaker 3: Like I said, I had a love for football, so a lot of my artwork is, you know, patriotic, or it was very much sports-based.
00:02:19 Speaker 4: So, you know, I kind of just started, I guess, on this
00:02:23 Speaker 3: diverging course of my love for veterans, and, you know, my patriotism growing and me growing as an artist just kind of set me on this course, too. I wanted to say thank you to our veterans.
00:02:39 Speaker 2: But the birth of Ray’s ultimate idea to say thank you happened in a movie theater.
00:02:45 Speaker 3: What the ultimate spark was is I was sitting in a movie theater watching the movie Saving Private Ryan. And, you know, if you’ve seen
00:02:53 Speaker 4: that movie, you know, the first half hour, you know, our
00:02:55 Speaker 3: men, and you could even say boys, some of them were seventeen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, are literally storming the beaches of Normandy, spilling their guts for our country. And it was just so realistic, so in your face of, you know, what, maybe a glimpse of what war was like.
00:03:14 Speaker 4: And I just left the theater
00:03:15 Speaker 3: saying, “I’ve got to find a way to say thank you to all our men and women that serve this country.” And that was kind of the birth of the Freedom Rock. When I had the idea to, you know, paint the very first Freedom Rock, I thought, “Where am I going to put this mural? Where?” You know, I have no experience as a mural artist. So for me, I wasn’t going to, you know, tap some business owner on the shoulder and say, “Hey, can I, have no experience at all? Can I paint the site of your wall?” So, you know, my thoughts turned to the rock out there. The first rock was known as just the rock.
00:03:53 Speaker 4: The rock. It sits next to a rock quarry.
00:03:55 Speaker 3: And, you know, they’re mining, you know, gravel and limestone and things out of this quarry, and they
00:04:00 Speaker 4: hit this huge granite boulder.
00:04:02 Speaker 3: So they just left it there as a marker in the entrance to the quarry, and kids started graffitiing it, and I started tagging it with, you know, all sorts of stuff.
00:04:11 Speaker 4: You know, I think there’s been
00:04:12 Speaker 3: marriage proposals, there have been. There was a giant M&M at once. There were, there were, I think, one of… I have one of the pictures, though. One of the funnier ones was Santa Claus with his pants down, mooning the traffic around Christmas, and, and that’s just kind of how it went. And I thought, “Hey, for Memorial Day, I’m gonna go out there. I’m gonna throw my paint on there, say thank you to the veterans.” And, you know, my thought was it’s going to get painted over and be long forgotten. You know, it was just going to be my one time to say thank you, and then
00:04:41 Speaker 4: it was going to continue to be graffiti through the years.
00:04:44 Speaker 3: I grabbed all the paint I could, what I thought was outdoor paint. I mixed oil and acrylic, which is a huge no-no in the art world. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was going to kind of teach myself how to paint a mural, and so that was, that was the start. And I just, it was bounded, determined to say thank you to these veterans. And, you know, my mom and dad always tell this little side story. I’m a college student, so I’m broke, and I was like, “Mom, can you buy the paint for this rock? I want to say thank you to our veterans.” And she called Dad and she was like, “I don’t, he wants to go paint that large boulder north of town.
00:05:22 Speaker 4: You know, do I buy the paint? It’s going to be fifty bucks.” And Dad was like, “Do it! Yeah, that sounds like a heck of a project.”
00:05:28 Speaker 3: And so they kind of both take credit for, you know, buying the first paint for the original Freedom Rock, and that’s how it was born. I painted “Thank you, Veterans, for our Freedom” and the flag raising at Iwo Jima because that is my all-time favorite picture, and it happened exactly like I thought. I painted it. It lasted for a few months, thank you to the veterans. Somebody painted over it. Fine, moving on. But the thing is, is Memorial Day came around again, and some local veterans asked, “Hey, will you go out there and paint that same thing that you did last year for us?”
00:05:59 Speaker 4: And I thought, “You know what? I’m gonna do one better.”
00:06:05 Speaker 3: And so I went out there and I painted Lee Teter’s Reflections, or at least a version of it, you know, painting it on a rock.
00:06:11 Speaker 4: And like I said, as a, as a budding mural artist, I still have a lot to learn.
00:06:15 Speaker 3: But I gave a shot at, you know, that famous “Reflections” Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall painting and some other scenes, and that ended up lasting
00:06:26 Speaker 4: for an entire year, which was unheard of.
00:06:29 Speaker 3: With the rock, it always got painted over within a month or two.
00:06:34 Speaker 4: But nobody touched that one.
00:06:37 Speaker 3: And so, last year, and that, with like, around the town, around the Adair County, where the rock was famous, everybody’s like, “Oh my God!”
00:06:43 Speaker 4: “Nobody’s painted over the rock! Nobody! What’s gonna happen? Nobody painted over the rock? Are we just leaving this how it is?”
00:06:48 Speaker 3: And instead of doing that, I thought, “Well, I don’t want to kill the spirit of
00:06:52 Speaker 4: the rock changing.”
00:06:53 Speaker 3: You know, people kind of got used to it having different artwork on it. So I thought, “Well, I’ll go out there and I’ll paint another different scene thanking our veterans.” And so that’s kind of what snowballed it into the annual tradition of, you know, I go out there at the start of May, and I allow myself the month of May. I finish my new artwork thanking our veterans. And I’m always done by Memorial Day, no matter what. So some years get more detail than others, just depending on weather and time and how many visitors I get. And that’s, that’s kind of the whole story of how the rock became, I guess, my canvas of choice, and how I’ve spent the past twenty-two years repainting every Memorial.
00:07:39 Speaker 2: Day, and since then, Ray’s project has expanded beyond the original rock. It’s a much, much larger operation now because of some interesting Iowan inspiration.
00:07:53 Speaker 3: I started the, what’s known as, the Freedom Rock Tour. I had the idea to try and paint a smaller version of the original Freedom Rock, and every single
00:08:01 Speaker 4: one of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties.
00:08:04 Speaker 3: I don’t know if you know, politics-wise, we have a very famous senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley. He’s always known for doing what’s called the “Full Grassley,” and that means, you know, visiting every single Iowa county, you know, every time he runs for reelection. And I thought, “You know, how neat of an idea is that to be able to go to each one of our ninety-nine counties, and, you know, how cool would it be as an artist to have a piece of artwork in all
00:08:29 Speaker 4: of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties.” And so that’s kind of where it was born.
00:08:33 Speaker 3: And my first idea was to try and do one in all fifty states.
00:08:37 Speaker 4: And my wife was
00:08:38 Speaker 3: like, “Hey, let’s, let’s scale it back a little bit and see. You know, let’s, let’s keep you closer to home and keep you in-state.” And so we kind of talked it over and we decided to do the one in every county in Iowa. And when we announced it, I thought, “You know, there’s only going to be a few people that get it.” Or, you know, I was like, I told my wife, “I was like, if we book ten in the first year, we’ll be lucky,” because I just didn’t figure people would jump on it that quickly. We ended up booking sixty of the Iowa counties in the first year, and then subsequently booked all the counties, and a few years after that, and started off.
00:09:16 Speaker 4: And I just finished a week or two ago.
00:09:19 Speaker 3: I finished the ninety-fifth out of ninety-nine counties in Iowa.
00:09:25 Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Ray Bubba Sorensen tell his story of the Freedom Rocks in Iowa. And it took Saving Private Ryan, well, to just act as a catalyst for this endeavor, the Freedom Rocks. The story continues here on Our American Stories, and we return to Our American Stories and the story of the Freedom Rocks, painted rocks thanking our veterans and found across the state of Iowa and slowly moving across the United States. Ray now shares with us the stories of some of the memorable people he’s met while painting these rocks. Take it away, Ray.
00:10:32 Speaker 3: I have a few really special stories that kind of stick out. Probably the very first one is, you know, goes with the guy that I call
00:10:41 Speaker 4: the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Rock.
00:10:43 Speaker 3: Now, he’s kind of been a caretaker of the flags out there and just kind of overall maintenance of what’s going on with the grounds around it. He’s a Vietnam veteran, and he was driving a semi-truck for one of the local companies in town, and I, I just started painting the one that, the very first one, and I put the, had the flag raising done. I was, I think, I was working on the lettering, and he’s coming down this large hill coming towards the rock, and he slams on the brakes of the semi-truck and pulls over. And I thought to myself, like, “Oh crap! I’m in trouble for painting this rock.” And I kept telling myself like I had called the quarry and asked permission.
00:11:22 Speaker 4: “I have every right to be here and paint this. You know.” This guy gets out of the truck, and he almost looks angry, and he’s like, “Are you on painting this?”
00:11:29 Speaker 3: And I was like, “Yes!” And I was like sweating a little bit, and he was like, “I just want
00:11:33 Speaker 4: to say thank you.” He’s like, “I was,
00:11:34 Speaker 3: Vietnam veterans didn’t get a very good welcome-home, and I appreciate, you know, people when they do stuff like this for our veterans.” And so it’s become kind of a lifelong friendship from there on out. And for the past twenty-two years he’s kind of helped me keep an eye on the rock and keep the flags up and flying. And so that was, that was one of the memorable ones. Another one, you know, a few years into painting it, I had a young man, and I say young man because I think he was younger than me even at the time, and I was fairly young. He had just gotten back from overseas, and he came out, and very polite, you know, said, “Appreciated my work.” Was veteran. He also appreciated how quiet it was when it wasn’t a patriotic holiday. Like, he didn’t, he didn’t come out to the rock on the Memorial Days, the Fourth of July, and things like that. He always came out on a non-holiday to sit and reflect. And he also said that, like, he was had, had… He told me, he’s like, “I had suicidal thoughts. I wasn’t feeling very good about myself or my service. I came out here, I sat on this little rock and I stared at your rock,” and he goes, “It just changed my whole perspective.” He goes, “I don’t want to get all mushy about it. I just wanted to be, I wanted to tell you that, and I wanted to tell you how much it
00:12:53 Speaker 4: meant to me.”
00:12:53 Speaker 3: And then he got up and left, and I thought, “Wow!” That’s, that was powerful. And that’s one. Stories like that are one of the many reasons people always ask, “Why do you continue to do this? Why do you continue to paint for our veterans?” And it’s veterans like that that I don’t know that I may be affecting in a positive way, and I hope I am.
00:13:12 Speaker 4: I hope it’s landing that way with all of them, whether I get to talk to them or not.
00:13:18 Speaker 3: I go to tell my wife, and I’ve told my parents before: if I get to save one veteran or if I’ve affected somebody like that, that’s good enough for me.
00:13:29 Speaker 2: Ray also creates murals with more than just paint.
00:13:33 Speaker 3: I’ve actually painted the remains, or cremains, of many veterans on the rock, or mixed them with the paint and painted them on there. So, at current, I’m around one hundred and twenty different Vietnam veterans’ ashes are mixed into the green paint of the helicopter on the north side of the rock. And how that started was some Vietnam veteran bikers that were on their way to the wall
00:13:56 Speaker 4: in Washington, D.C., for Memorial Day, stopped at the rock.
00:14:01 Speaker 3: I was painting a tribute to our, you know, Vietnam veterans at the time, and they, you know, they absolutely loved it, and they go, “Hey, can we go get some ashes of our recently fallen Vietnam veteran brothers and sprinkle them here by the rock?” And I said, “I wish you’d just dump them in my paint can, and I’ll paint them on the rock, because it’s so windy out here. You know, I don’t want them to blow away in the wind.” And they loved that idea, so they, about seven or eight of them, went and got these ashes, and they kind of all dumped them into my paint can, and I mixed them up and painted it all on these helicopters on the, on the north side of the rock.
00:14:34 Speaker 4: And they loved it.
00:14:35 Speaker 3: And I thought that was a neat little tribute, and I thought it was over after that, and then I started getting Vietnam veterans’ ashes in the mail, started getting them from all over the country, and they came with letters, and they came in different little pill boxes and ornate vases and sometimes just Ziploc bags, and they came saying, “This is my brother. He passed away from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.”
00:15:02 Speaker 4: “Loved your rock, loved your work. Wants to have parts of his remains on…”
00:15:05 Speaker 3: this rock. Got to the point where I don’t think my wife liked to go into the P.O. box, because there was always cremains, you know, waiting for us. And I just, what I did is, I collected them.
00:15:16 Speaker 4: Each year.
00:15:17 Speaker 3: I’d let them ride around in the truck with me until it was Memorial Day and I was done with the rock. And they were always my final addition at one o’clock on Memorial Day.
00:15:28 Speaker 4: And they still are.
00:15:29 Speaker 3: So I still collect, you know, our Vietnam veterans who, who want to be part of the rock. I collect their ashes, and they all go on. We read their names off, we paint them onto the rock, and they’re there forever. The hard part, and how it’s gotten harder for me, is I’ve known a lot of these veterans. Now I’ve gotten to know them over the years, and they’ve always said they want their final resting place to be that rock. And then they’ve passed away, and it’s, you know, yeah, I’ve become friends with these guys, and yeah, it gets, it gets harder and harder, but I always try and say, “You know, it’s a unique memorial and kind of a unique place for them to be, and I’m so honored to even be a part of it.” One of the guys that was in the veterans hospital out in Omaha, his son called me and said, “Can I bring my dad out to the rock?” He is not in good health. “Would you meet us out there?” And I said, “Absolutely, I’ll go out there and say hi. I’m in town.” And went out there and met him and shook his hand, and he had oxygen hooked up to him, and he was like, “Well, the hospital wasn’t very crazy about us getting him out here, but he really wanted to see the rock. He wanted to touch the rock, and he’d like to ask you if he can have his ashes put on the rock.” And I said, “Well, absolutely, but, you know, stick around. Let’s, you know, we’d like to see get better.” And what I didn’t know was that he was in his final days, and two days later I got the call that he had passed, and his ashes were on the way, and so his family came out and we, I believe, we didn’t do that one on Memorial Day. I think we did it on like July Fourth, because they just, they wanted to have, like, more of a private ceremony and have the ashes go on in that way.
00:17:15 Speaker 4: But I just thought, that’s, it’s
00:17:17 Speaker 3: amazing how much the Freedom Rock’s message has gotten out there,
Discover more real American voices.
