On June 6 this year, I remembered D-day again.  I was going on 7 years old when it occurred.  I remember it well.  A child of 7 doesn't remember very much, but some things are important.  I saw the pictures of the landing when I went to the movie on Saturdays.  Nobody had a TV back then, just a radio.  We went to the movies to see the news in pictures.  Moving pictures.  Of course, the "Landing" pictures were edited.  And they were very heroic in nature.  The next few years of my life were filled with images of the war.  Every Saturday.  The movie news was what we had.

We supported the war by buying "War Bonds." (Which the government had no funds to pay back.) But everyone knew that this was a war that we couldn't lose.  The Nazi's would control all of Europe if we lost.  They would expand their ungodly pogrom through every country. That was unthinkable.

A few years ago, I went to the beach in Normandy where the landing occurred.  And I realized that those pictures at the movies had been completely, almost totally edited.  As I stood on the top of the cliff--the terribly high wall--that our boys had to cross the beach to climb, I couldn't stop crying.  It was so real.  I could close my eyes and almost see our 18 year old young men being mowed down by the guns from the concrete bunkers on top of the cliff.  I don't know how any of them got across the hundreds upon hundreds of yards of beach alive, much less up the wall of the cliff.  Where do such brave men come from? How did they have the strength to keep moving as soldier after soldier was mowed down beside them?  How did any of them survive crossing the beach to the cliff?

But cross it they did, and climbed the wall.  The day I went to Normandy there weren't any other people around.  The beach was empty, but still strewn with remains of the war--left there to show that it was a historical place.  I started crying when I stepped out of the car and saw the hundreds upon hundreds of crosses where our dead Americans had been buried.  I was still weeping when we got back in the car to go back to the train station.  It was an experience that broke your heart.  D-day.

Maybe it hit me so hard because it was the first time I had ever seen the remains of a war, and realized that it wasn't a cleaned up picture you go see at the movies.  That it was a horrible thing to face and try to do your job and survive--and Ken had done that in two wars and numerous deployments.  It became real to me, and it was so very tragic.  I understood my husband better.  He seldom talked about it.  You almost have to see it to believe it.  War.  The horrible remains of war.