Friday, June 6, 2014

Normandy 70 years later

Two old men, veterans of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy by US, Canadian and British forces to free France, begin the liberation of Europe and defeat Germany's Third Reich, were sitting earlier today behind President Obama as he spoke at the 70th anniversary of D-Day at the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach. These men, 93 and 94 years old, are from California and wanted to go to France for this occasion but were leery of traveling so far on their own.

Our friend Bruce, a lawyer here in town, offered to take them and be, as he called it, their bagman, to meet them at the airport in Paris and manage all the details from there. He was listening to the President today too, from a seat somewhere on the fringe, applauding his traveling companions with, I'm sure, his eyes welling. He got these two codgers from CDG to Normandy and into a beautiful home that was donated to house them and other veterans; he has driven the rented car and taken them to see where their fellow soldiers climbed cliffs and slogged through sand and where many thousands of them died trying to do their part. Bruce made sure that these guys got three squares a day, found the closest bathroom fast and even pitched in when the 93 yo wanted a tub bath and a back scrub and couldn't manage on his own. Old men often need a hand. Bruce is generous, selfless, has a huge heart and believes in honor; a better bagman doesn't exist.

Bruce's wife Gail is in Paris, watching it on TV and waiting for him to get back to her after putting the vets safely on planes headed home to California. I was supposed to be there with her in an apartment we had rented, giddy with excitement to have five days of shared luxury with a great good friend, no schedules, no men, looking forward to walking and sketching, writing and taking iPhone pics, searching for good coffee and fabulous food and trying not to shop too much, but I was here with another old man who was ill, for a brief time gravely so, instead of on Rue Barbette. Paris isn't going anywhere, my dad would have said, a vet himself of the Pacific theater of the same war, the pilot of a Corsair. He was also, for too short a time, an old man.

We all measure events against others of the same category that we know best. The wars of my generation in Vietnam and Iraq made me a pacifist in great part because I hold them up against World War II, a war against evil so obvious that American men flooded enlistment offices to fight it. The soldiers and Marines fought no less bravely in these more recent wars, but the reasons they were given to do so were suspect and dishonest. To offer up your self, even to your last breath, to free people you don't even know, to be some small part of the defeat of a beast like Adolf Hitler, as despicable a person as has ever existed, and to do it without a second thought or a backward glance is something I haven't experienced and can't truly know. But I understand what the President said today, "When the world makes you a cynic, remember these men."

When Mack is well again, maybe I'll take him with me, back to the cliffs and craters at Pointe du Hoc, the long, wide stretches of sand on the beaches that arc from Vierville-sur-Mer to Deauville, and to the American cemetery. We will go not as tourists but as pilgrims. I want to sit on the grass among the hundreds of rows of headstones and listen to the waves breaking beyond the trees and below the bluffs. I want to press my cheek against the cold white marble that stands guard over the body of someone who would be an old man now if he hadn't so willingly died for the good of the world, and say thank you
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