D-Day

I went to Normandy in High School, on a trip with my French class.  We spent most of our time in France doing pretty typical tourist stuff: castles, chateaus, the Eiffel Tower, even a winery.  The day we were going to go to Omaha beach was cold and rainy.  Our tour guide was a little french woman, who actually looked exactly what you would expect a French tour guide to look like, and who much to the delight of a bunch of adolescents pronounce the word beach like "bitch." She was standing up in the front of the bus saying things like, "when we get to the bitch, we are going to have about two hours to walk around and see the bitch." The boys in the back of the bus chuckled, because we were 17 and idiots.
When we did get to the bitch, I mean beach, the laughter stopped abruptly.  The bus stopped in a parking area where you could see the gray expanse of the North Atlantic and a couple of bunkers atop a cliff, but the thing that immediately yanked your eyes and shut your stupid mouth was the white crosses and stars of David that covered the landscape, thousands of them.  We got off the bus silently, pretty much for the first time in a week that we were really quiet as a group.  I walked down to the cliff, looked in a few bunkers and meandered along the coastline, I saw the iron beams still rusting away in the surf, I saw the sheer impossibility of landing on such a narrow strip of sand with machine guns perched in those concrete pill boxes.  I began to get a sort of choking feeling in the back of my throat.
I turned up the hill and started to walk among the graves, looking at the names.  It dawned on me that a lot of those names were probably not much older than me when they piled out of the landing vehicles and went into the meat grinder.  Saving Private Ryan was still a few years off, so at least I didn't have that vivid visual to go with it.  I wondered if they had been sitting out on the ships before the invasion, laughing at rude and inappropriate jokes just like my classmates on the bus.  They probably had, in fact it may have been worse.  The shadow of the gallows tends to bring out the blackest type of humor.
I sort  of lost track of time, we were supposed to be there for two hours, but the grim Normandy weather had apparently altered the deal with most of my classmates, as I came within sight of the bus, I noticed that it was beginning to move, I was about to be left in a graveyard in a foreign country, but all I could do was laugh.  The sobriety of the past hour or so made the prospect of actually getting left behind by my tour bus, just not even that big of a deal.
Fortunately for me the bus stopped, my seat mate had done his job and told the teacher that we were one idiot short.  I saw my teacher pop out of the door of the bus, scan the terrain and start waving and yelling at me to get down there pronto (huite, huite). I did, and I got back on the bus, and back into the world of high school kids making fun for almost getting left behind.  I looked back on all those white markers that were actual kids who were going to stay there forever. 75 years they have been there, having given everything for the sake of humanity (that war was more about that than most people realized at the time).
Even the ones who survived are leaving us now. This is not a political statement, just a reality that all of us need to deal with: we should be worthy of what they did, and what they gave us at the cost of their lives, that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan where Ryan asks his family if he was worthy of the sacrifices that were made for him, is something we all need to ask ourselves.  Remember them yes, but more importantly let's work on getting to be the country they were fighting for rather than a bunch of idiots who get distracted by stupid things and shiny objects.