The commonplace pablum in this meme is widely accepted uncritically (apart from its obvious poetic disregard for the laws of physics). But, of course, it isn't completely, or even mostly, true.
U.S. soldiers died to protect the freedom of the South Koreans. They died, futilely, to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese. They fought wars and sometimes died in Somalia, in Kosovo, in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf, in Afghanistan, in Syria and in World War I in Europe, to make the world a better place in ways that our leaders had deemed worthy of their sacrifice. Those sacrifices often made other people more free. Those sacrifices were not meaningless for the most part (although in cases that ultimately resulted in failure like Vietnam and Afghanistan, it is a harder case to make).
But honestly, the freedom of Americans in the United States was never seriously imperiled, win, lose, or draw, in any of those conflicts, nor was it in the many military interventions in Latin America in which the U.S. has engaged. The notion that these wars prevented terrorism is likewise doubtful.
The wars in which U.S. freedom was really plausibly at stake were the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the U.S. Civil War, and World War II.
The Revolutionary War secured our independence from Britain, and the War of 1812 reinforced it, although in hindsight, our British rulers didn't turn out to be all that terribly horrible in the long run (to which our friends in British North America a.k.a. Canada can attest), and we're fast friends with the U.K. now.
The U.S. Civil War freed the slaves and made white Southerners less free in ways that their ancestors resent to this day. This was worth fighting and deserve the slogan in the meme. But the freedom of people in Union states was never really in question, and white Southerners, while disregarding the opinions of slaves and even freed blacks, widely supported succession democratically.
U.S. participation in World War II was critical in making the world safe for all the U.S. held dear, but presented only a modest domestic threat. Japan probably would never have tried to conquer Hawaii after destroying the U.S. fleet there, and neither Japan nor German, nor their allies, seriously considered invading the U.S. mainland, although perhaps if they had conquered the rest of the world, they would have done so.
Also, lots of Americans had their freedom limited during World War II, sometimes necessarily, but none the less freedoms were lost, and in the case of Japanese-Americans, these restrictions on their freedoms were extreme, undeserved, and have gone uncompensated.
The U.S. also fought wars of conquest, such as the Mexican-American War and the series of conflicts over many decades on U.S. territory described for statistical purposes by the U.S. military as "the Indian Wars." These too made some people in what was, or would come to be, part of the U.S. less free, and provided opportunities to others.
Also, quite a few of those who sacrificed and died in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, were draftees, i.e. young men who were temporarily enslaved and forced to fight by the government. The freedom of the draftees who died was not enhanced by their military service.
Ultimately, I am not an anti-war pacifist. Sometimes war is worth it or necessary. But the main pithy knee jerk justification for all that we paid in blood and treasure in our many wars also vastly overstates the historical reality.
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