Today is the 80th anniversary of the huge, costly, and ultimately successful allied D-Day land assault on Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Although mere words never can remotely capture what happened that fateful day in June 1944, I want to share a powerful experience that my dear late wife, Imogene, and I once had there on Omaha Beach.

One morning in July 1990, we stood on the 100-foot-high cliff overlooking Omaha Beach. Even with a week in Paris (our favorite city) and 10 days in our beloved Ireland ahead of us, we assumed this moment would be the emotional highpoint of this trip.

In the spring, we had felt the urge for another trip to Europe in general, and Paris and Ireland in particular. We had toyed with visiting the newly reunited Berlin, but that came in second to touring Brittany and Normandy.

After renting a car at Charles de Gaulle Airport, we headed west. We would return for a week in Paris before flying to Dublin. Another rental car would take us west to rendezvous with long-time dear friends, Sharon and Kent Smith. After touring the West of Ireland together, Imogene and I would return home, and Sharon and Kent would continue on to England’s Lake District. Peaceful all.

Both Imogene and I had left home with bad sinus bouts, but we holed up in a Brittany Oceanside hotel to heal while watching French families on holiday along the beach below our hotel window. Right off, we always found a good patisserie—and stocked up; we swear by the medicinal power of good spice-free European pastries.

Feeling better, we toured the Brittany and Normandy countrysides, beaches and villages, and the Bayeux tapestry.  Some beaches were crowded with people, some still held reinforced concrete bunkers with their large caliber, rapid-fire guns aimed to strafe the beach. Several times we ended the day by watching the sun set behind Mont. St. Michelle.  We saved Omaha Beach until last.

We looked out over the huge and immaculately maintained U.S. Cemetery above Omaha Beach. Finally, we turned to study the beach and the narrow sand spit that ran parallel to the beach for some 150 yards, creating a lagoon some 50 feet wide between spit and beach. We wished to descend the long concrete stairs and walk the sand spit, but it was occupied. In a place such as this, deference to personal space and solitude is understood. 

We watched a tall, thin woman, dressed in black. Being 100 feet higher and some 75 yards distant, and seeing only her back, we guessed her to be 50-ish in age, maybe older. She walked slowly, stopping every few steps to look down at something held with both hands. Letter? Photograph? Telegram from the government? Husband? Father? Brother?  Uncle? We so wanted to know, maybe to console. But she surely was deep within herself, where she needed to be. She had not come all this way to visit, but to try and sense something of what this beach had seen that June day 44 years before, to sense something of the Hell that her loved one had met and probably not survived.       

We too were burdened with wanting to capture a sense of the destruction, the desperation, the fear, the carnage, the courage that occurred that day along a beach now being disturbed only by a gently lapping surf. We, of course, never really considered how we might have handled the situation had even the faintest hint of that horrible time slammed into our brain waves. But, viewing the long rows of graves holding the loyal and brave who had fallen on the sands only a few yards away, I had shuddered at the thought that on D-Day I was a mere five years shy of draft age. History’s caprice could have fashioned a quite different destiny for those of my age.

Finally, with the spit empty, we descended and walked the sand. Ahead of us a large flock of gulls was scurrying to keep a distance. Ultimately, we were too close, and the gulls ran to take off. The last gull airborne had been hopping, had been having difficulty clearing the sand. That’s when a flash from an earlier violent time broke through. That gull’s right leg was but a stub.