D-Day
June 6. D-Day. It’s about 7 a.m. as I write this. In Normandy France it’s 1:58 p.m. On D-Day 1944, it would be about seven hours into the landings on the six mile stretch called Omaha Beach. The American’s would have established a beachhead but about 2,500 boys would be dead, wounded, or missing doing it. Being at Omaha was bad luck because it was the deadliest of the five invasion beaches.
World War II is my war because it was the soil from which I sprung. It was current history throughout my youth and middle years. The men who fought it were my father and uncles. I watched Victory at Sea on television. It was how I learned geography by tracking battles across and around the world. Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima were real places to me where real things happened. I knew men who had been there. One of my bosses in the early 80s was a beachmaster with the third marine division.
Now it’s just another war in a long line of wars and we’ve substituted visions of John Wayne with visions of other actors doing heroic things in movie combat and people come to Fredericksburg and the Nimitz Museum to watch re-enactments of Pacific Campaigns. But I told my brother, who works part time at the museum, if they really wanted to show what war was like they’d go to a slaughterhouse and get buckets of blood and meat trimmings then leave it all out in the sun for a couple of days. That would be a battlefield simulation for the ages. But it won’t happen, and we’ll keep sending boys to war.