shouldazagged
Absent Comrade
Seventy-five years ago today, 6 June, 1944, my father landed, unarmed, on Omaha Beach, with one of the first units ashore in the first wave, an engineering outfit. On the way to the beach he had had an amphibious vehicle shot out from under him by a German 88mm gun.
He was thirty-three years old, so much older than the young GI's around him that they called him "Pop". He was exempt from the draft because he was terribly short-sighted. He had a wife and two young sons (I was the elder) at home. He didn't have to be on that hellish stretch of sand, pinned down at the base of a sea wall covered by German machine gun and artillery fire.
He was a war correspondent. He stayed with the troops through the breakout from Omaha and Normandy.
He almost never talked about it, afterward. He once spoke briefly to me about that sea wall. Later he told my sister, "You never got used to the smell."
He died at ninety. In his last decade or so of life, if someone asked him what his occupation had been, he would square his frail shoulders and proudly answer, "War correspondent."
After World War II he became an overseas correspondent who covered both of the first two atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, toured the displaced persons camps in Europe, and did a series of articles from South America. He was an editor and teacher of journalism. He retired after forty-four years as a journalist and entered the ministry, retiring three more times after that, the last time at eighty.
But his proudest job? War correspondent, with its climactic day 6 June, 1944.
Today, let us all give thanks for the men who landed on those five beaches, and all the men and women who fought what I believe was the last war we absolutely had to win to survive as a free nation.
If you know one of the terribly few surviving veterans of that war, give him or her a hand salute, a hug, and your thanks.
I'll be remembering my dad, and that deadly sea wall on Omaha Beach.
He was thirty-three years old, so much older than the young GI's around him that they called him "Pop". He was exempt from the draft because he was terribly short-sighted. He had a wife and two young sons (I was the elder) at home. He didn't have to be on that hellish stretch of sand, pinned down at the base of a sea wall covered by German machine gun and artillery fire.
He was a war correspondent. He stayed with the troops through the breakout from Omaha and Normandy.
He almost never talked about it, afterward. He once spoke briefly to me about that sea wall. Later he told my sister, "You never got used to the smell."
He died at ninety. In his last decade or so of life, if someone asked him what his occupation had been, he would square his frail shoulders and proudly answer, "War correspondent."
After World War II he became an overseas correspondent who covered both of the first two atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, toured the displaced persons camps in Europe, and did a series of articles from South America. He was an editor and teacher of journalism. He retired after forty-four years as a journalist and entered the ministry, retiring three more times after that, the last time at eighty.
But his proudest job? War correspondent, with its climactic day 6 June, 1944.
Today, let us all give thanks for the men who landed on those five beaches, and all the men and women who fought what I believe was the last war we absolutely had to win to survive as a free nation.
If you know one of the terribly few surviving veterans of that war, give him or her a hand salute, a hug, and your thanks.
I'll be remembering my dad, and that deadly sea wall on Omaha Beach.
