D-Day: I Cannot Imagine .....

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to cross this expanse of sand, now known as Omaha Beach, which must have looked like miles of open space to those warriors who jumped into deep water with enormous weight strapped on their backs to start wading/swimming/paddling/dodging the firepower coming at them as they jumped into the Channel.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to look over at the next landing craft, which carried some of the best friends you made while preparing for this day, blown to hell and back.

I cannot imagine the last thoughts of those who faced the purest terror known to mankind, the Nazis, comfortably ensconced in their ten-foot walls of concrete bunkers above the beach, firing at will with every imaginable firearm made available by a desperate Hitler and Rommel.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like to think these are my last minutes, last moments, last seconds, of life and to imagine leaving little children and a wife and the home we'd both worked so hard to acquire; to have it all taken away by (if I were lucky) one piece of lead coming unheard, unseen, invisible until it entered the head, exploding it ending whatever life I'd dreamt of.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like, if I were one of the lucky ones blessed enough to make it up to the mid-beach area, to look over and see my brother-in-arms turned into a pink mist by the incessant, uninterrupted stream of machine gun fire from those bunkers up the hill.

I cannot imagine the almost terminal surrender which must have gone through my mind if I were one of the few to make it up to the brush and tangled weeds covering the bluffs of Normandy there above Omaha Beach, or similarly difficult terrain at Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Gold Beach and Juno Beach.

I cannot imagine the courage, dedication to mission, the sheer, absolute devotion to duty it must have taken to be in one of the most miraculous contingents of warriors ever put together in one battle, The Rangers, who scaled the sheer cliffs of Pointe du Hoc under intense fire. The maneuver took most of those heroic Rangers out, but they reached the pinnacle. Their efforts were remembered by President Ronald Reagan on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day. The speech was one of the most moving remembrances in American history.

I can’t imagine what it must be like today for those few dozen survivors of June 6, 1944; to know that not only my time is near but that the time within which the world will remember the sacrifice there is slowly but surely coming to an end. Imagine how that must feel to have survived that hell on Earth after volunteering your life to fight for a dream, for a dream that's beginning to fade away. I cannot imagine how that must feel.

But as hard as it is to imagine what it must have been like on those miles-wide beaches of Normandy on June 1044, I am heartened by the knowledge that many still remember our sacrifice in many commemerations being held on the anniversary of D-Day. As King Charles said yesterday in Portsmouth, they replaced “tyranny with freedom.”

I may not be able to imagine all these things from the vantage of the peaceful, serene, relatively secure, liberty-and-freedom-based life they have given me through their unimaginable sacrifice but I can send to them my eternal, lasting, boundless and everlasting appreciation for what they endured so that we might be free.

I salute them with all the gratitude God has blessed me with, and with every single bit of love I have for those who, in the truest sense of the phrase, saved the world—and us— from the slavery and cruelty of Fascism.

I salute and thank the Warriors of June 6, 1944.

I thank them for their inestimable service.

May God Bless them and keep them in eternal life, and make light perpetual shine upon them.