Photo by Tim Street

Tracie Ortman on Omaha Beach, site of 2,500 American deaths on June 6, 1944.

Forgive me if I get tongue-tied.  I’m not sure I have the words to fully communicate my thoughts.

Today was our tour of Normandy. We also visited Bayeux and Arromanches, but someone else will write about that part of the tour. I will focus on the morning. Focus on the bit of the day which, for me, was the most personal: Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery.

My grandfather fought during World War II. He was an infantryman in the U.S. Army and served in Italy at Anzio Beach – a place Ernie Pyle visited and wrote a good deal about. It’s also where my grandfather became shell-shocked. During his months at Anzio he saw several friends killed and several more gravely injured.

Photo by Tim Street

Audrie Garrison watches as Beka Mech writes her grandfather’s name in the sand at Omaha Beach.

The war destroyed my grandfather, who was eventually reassigned to the Philippines. Were he not reassigned there, he may very well have been on Omaha Beach on D-Day.  

Driving to Omaha Beach, we passed through the village of St. Laurent sur Mer, a town which was destroyed during D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. It’s since been rebuilt and is just lovely. There are stone houses with thatched roofs, the greenest grass and the volatile beauty of the English Channel.

It was difficult to be there amidst all that beauty and to think of all those dead. 2,500 Americans died on Omaha. It was all I could think of – the dead. Dead Ernie Pyle saw, and wrote about.

"The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers’ bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them."*

I walked down onto the beach, as did all of us, and saw it full of men. Young men with dreams and hopes. The tide was low but was beginning to move forward. Then, as now, my mind went empty. Not of feeling but of thought. I think it was the only way my mind could make sense of the awfulness of what happened on June 6, 1944, and the simply serenity of the beach claims now.

The emptiness followed me to the American Cemetery.

Photo by Tim Street

A handful of the 9,386 grave markers at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy.

At the cemetery, there is a sculpture – "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Sea" –- as well as maps of the D-Day assault and European campaign and the Wall of the Missing. Those are the first few things you see upon walking into the cemetery. Then there are the graves. Row upon row of white tombstones, crosses and Stars of David, blooming out of the verdant field.

While walking among the graves, John McCrae’s poem "In Flanders Fields" kept running through my head. Although that was about World War I it seemed to ring true there among the dead of the Second Great War.

"We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields."

Photo by Tim Street

Inside the Wall of the Missing, looking at the memorial that contains the sculpture "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Sea" and maps of Normandy and the European theater.

Among the stones I found a soldier from my home state of Ohio. There was no hometown and no date of birth on PFC Laurence P. Mauser’s gravestone. Simply his name, rank, army division, what state he was from and the day he died. That was all. I suppose it should be enough.  He could have been one of those slumbering under the simple phrase "Here rests in Honored Glory a Comrade in Arms, Known but to God". At least PFC Mauser has his name.

At the beach I picked a daisy I saw growing in the grass, planning to press it and place it in an album with the photos I took on Omaha Beach. Instead I found myself placing it on Mauser’s stone. I don’t know why; it just felt like the right thing to do at the moment.  

My time at Omaha Beach will forever be imprinted on my mind. It certainly seemed imprinted on Ernie Pyle’s.

"But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead man by mass production … Dead men in such monstrous infinity you come almost to hate them."**

I can’t hate them.  But I certainly can’t forget them.    

*From Pyle’s column "A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish," published June 17, 1944
**From Pyle’s unpublished column "On Victory In Europe"
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