Breaching the Atlantic Wall
In the age of Social Media, even the most trivial of events is monumentalized with hype and hyperbole. Rather than making the mundane seem important, it tends to trivialize everything. Standing at Dog Red Sector, Omaha Beach in Normandy, perspective returns and hype fades. Because all along the Channel Coast of France, within my father’s lifetime, human waves broke upon these shores. They fell like leaves over its villages. Those men began the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany. There isn’t a single village on the Northern Coast of Normandy that doesn’t live in the pages of history. Vierville. Pointe du Hoc. Colleville, St.-Mère-Église. Carantan. Caen. Saint-Lô. From John Steele dangling from his parachute atop the belltower of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in St.-Mère-Église, to Rangers scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, to soldiers disembarking from Higgins Boats into the yawning maw of death itself on Omaha Beach, history recorded their names in blood. Memory fades and the scarred earth in Normandy re-absorbs the blood of the fallen, as it had for decades before World War II, but the dead of Normandy do not bid us remember them, but rather pass onto us the challenge to not repeat the errors that demanded their sacrifice. As it has in the past, one careless rhetorical spark may be sufficient to start the fire that burns away a future generation’s youth and innocence. Let these memorials and monuments be the last history demands of us.
