In the past, I have commemorated the anniversary of D-Day by trying to relate the courage and bravery of those men who stormed the beaches of France with our current military and their effort in the Middle East. It seemed to me at the time to be vitally important that we recalled that heroism exhibited by our “Citizen Soldiers” from so many years ago in order to steel ourselves for the challenges we face on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as future battlefields as yet unnamed.

But the road I’ve travelled these past months has caused me to see the conflicts in which we are currently engaged on a more personal level. A young man falls on a grenade and saves the lives of his comrades. Who was he? What was he like? Or perhaps the story of a mother serving her country while her husband and children try to make do at home, missing her terribly with the children not understanding why their mom can’t be with them.

The fact is, we can talk all we want to about the grand strategy in this war and the political fights at home to end it. But the truth is, it all comes down to the guys with the guns who volunteered to serve the larger purposes of their government. No matter what side of the war you are on or what you think about the government that is prosecuting it, you are a small minded person indeed if you can’t see past your boosterism or denigration of the war itself and recognize that individual American citizens, trained and equipped better than any army in the history of civilization, are placing themselves in harms way every day to fulfill a private compact they made with we, the people of the United States. Quite simply, they took an oath to protect us. They promised to take up arms and fight when our freely elected government determined that it was necessary for them to do so.

It is obvious that a sizable majority of them in Iraq believe quite firmly that their efforts are worth the price they are paying. When more than 70% of them re-enlist in order to return despite the extended tours, the hardship the war is causing their families, the personal discomfort of serving in a war zone, and the dangers of combat, even the densest among us must realize that the desire to serve a cause greater than themselves outweighs all else.

You may disagree vehemently with that cause. But who are we - any of us - be we supporters or opponents of our involvement in Iraq to tell these people that they are either right or wrong in what they believe? It seems to me that they have more than earned the right to follow their own lights and don’t require our pity or thanks for that matter. But their actions and sacrifices demand our respect. And that they will have from me until my dying day.

I’ll leave you this D-Day Anniversary with an extended excerpt from one of the participants. Felix Branham was a demolitions expert in the 29th division who went ashore in the second wave at Omaha Beach. His compelling story is told in its entirety here.

We didn’t talk of dying, unless it was a joke. We used to kid a guy named Gino because he carried a big wad of money, $700 or $800, and he had a beautiful ring.

I would say, “Ferrari, when you hit that beach and you fall, man, I’m going to be getting your wallet out.” And another guy would say, “Yep, I’m going to have that ring of yours.”

And we sat around and thought about that, never thinking it would really happen. But what else did we have to talk about?

[...]

We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far and we’d been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home. Well, as it was, we had to settle for another day. We loaded again on Monday afternoon. The rain was letting up some and we started to move out about 10:30 or 11:00 that night. It was still light.

We got twelve miles from Normandy and stopped. We had been told there was a sand bar about 50 yards off shore. [We were also told] if our coxswain on our landing craft let that ramp down, don’t let him do that. Make him go over sideways, but don’t let him let the ramp down because people will drown. Well, that came to pass. A lot of people drowned that way.

We were in the second wave. When we got to the beach, there were 2nd and 5th Rangers piling in with us at the same time. We had a regimental commander named Charles D. Canham and he went in leading us. He was our colonel. There he was firing. He got his rifle shot out of his hand and he reached down and used his .45. He was about 55 years old and was the bravest guy and one of the finest leader. We had lots of leaders. Our platoon leaders, our platoon sergeants, we had good leaders. There’s no question. If we hadn’t had good leaders, we would have never made it off of Omaha Beach.

My boat team was the first one to go over the sea wall; I saw some of my friends die. In my boat team of thirty men we had only lost about five or six men. We were lucky. God knows we were. We followed the line that the engineers had laid out and we got through. We went up the hill then went parallel to Omaha Beach through this little town. Mingled in with us were the 2nd and 5th Rangers. They were scattered about and so forth. Of course, there was a lot of scattering about on Omaha Beach.

[...]

The first man I saw from my company to die was a guy named Gene Ferrara. He was little Italian boy out of Jersey City. He was the kid we teased about carrying $700-$800 in his wallet. I landed and told him to move up. He moved up and then I got ready to move up, too. We were going leaps and bounds, trying to get cover and get behind the sea wall. I moved up ahead of him and happened to look back. The tide was beginning to take him back; he had been killed.

It was chaotic. No one can realize it until they were right there to see it. But you hear so many tales about it. Each one of us had our own little battle field. D-Day was D-Day, and it was awful.

That’s all I can tell you. When we landed on Omaha Beach, we were well trained, we had good leaders, and the Lord God Almighty was with us, and that’s all I can say. That was D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

I have never been back there, but I would love to go. I can’t think of anything that I would rather do right now than to go back to Normandy and see it. I have a little bottle sitting in my living room with sand from Omaha Beach in it. I would love to go and shovel some up in my hand myself and see what I saw on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Ordinary men exhibiting extraordinary courage. And there were 30,000 stories from the beaches that day, all of them equally poignant but all of them different.

Remember them all today…