Always Remember

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men to do nothing.

Today is the 72nd anniversary of D-Day.  As I sit and watch the rain fall on my first official day of summer vacation I am reminded that any inconvenience or trial or suffering I endure is insignificant in relation to what tens of thousands of young men endured on those beaches of France so long ago.

Rain on the roof?  Imagine the rain of bullets on the front of your Higgins boat, knowing the door will drop in seconds and those bullets will tear through you.

Altered plans?  You've just watched your leaders die in front of you, what you were told would happen didn't, and the bullets and bombs just keep falling.

Feeling overwhelmed?  Put yourself in the wet boots of a 20 year-old kid in a foreign country who has just waded through blood-red ocean water littered with bodies to cross an open beach in a hail of gun fire and upon crossing that beach to relatively safe cover must now scale a hillside towards the source of the shooting and continue the assault.  Kind of makes stopping to pick up milk on the way home seem a little bit trite, doesn't it?

My words cannot do justice to the magnitude of Operation Overlord - I have used Stephen E. Ambrose's book D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, The War documentary by Ken Burns, or the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan as my sources for understanding the events of D-Day  - so instead I'll use my words to encourage you, respected reader, to use a piece of this day to find out what was so special about that day.  Thousands of soldiers died for us on D-Day - the least we can do is find out how and where they died...and always remember why.