RoshawnMarkwees
Assimilationist
- Dec 23, 2009
- 35,660
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This is from a column written near the 50th anniversary of D-Day, recalling an episode on the 40th anniversary...
“Their Courage Is a Matter Of My Pride
By STEVE TWOMEY
May 2, 1994
Vierville-sur-Mer is a French village, but that overstates the case. It's perched on a scruffy bluff overlooking the English Channel, and it's so small -- or was a decade ago, when I was last there -- that your choices of a place to eat, drink and gab amount to one, if I remember right. My wife-to-be and I wandered into that one place about half past 10 on the night of June 5, 1984. We were its only American patrons, a fact that we didn't advertise but that was evident to all as soon as we spoke our version of French. We ate and headed to the bar, where sat the postman, the handyman, the barkeep, a couple of others.
Soon, the clock slipped past midnight, unveiling the sixth of June. It had been at about that hour, precisely 40 years earlier, when the sky over the Normandy countryside had begun filling with thousands of Americans and Brits, leaping out of an armada of aircraft, floating down to a land that was not their own. They had come to free it. So had the thousands of other Americans who, a few hours later at dawn, stumbled out of landing craft beneath the Vierville bluff and onto a beach being cross-stitched by German machine guns, mortars and artillery. That beach would be known forever more, even to the French, by its invasion code, the name of a place in the American heartland, Omaha. Many of the Yanks coming ashore were Virginians and Marylanders, because the 29th Division was among the attackers, and its main combat units consisted of two regiments of Maryland's National Guard and one of Virginia's. And now, just past midnight four decades later, someone in the bar raised a glass. "To the Americans," he said. We were confused. Which Americans? Had someone come in? The other patrons turned, arms raised. And drank to the two of us. I can't replay that moment without getting teary. The gratitude of a room of Frenchmen for the selfless act of a distant people was so genuine that I wanted to hug them, to say it was nothing, though of course it was everything in the world to them. “
From here...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...220d3e9/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eac8954cad5e
“Their Courage Is a Matter Of My Pride
By STEVE TWOMEY
May 2, 1994
Vierville-sur-Mer is a French village, but that overstates the case. It's perched on a scruffy bluff overlooking the English Channel, and it's so small -- or was a decade ago, when I was last there -- that your choices of a place to eat, drink and gab amount to one, if I remember right. My wife-to-be and I wandered into that one place about half past 10 on the night of June 5, 1984. We were its only American patrons, a fact that we didn't advertise but that was evident to all as soon as we spoke our version of French. We ate and headed to the bar, where sat the postman, the handyman, the barkeep, a couple of others.
Soon, the clock slipped past midnight, unveiling the sixth of June. It had been at about that hour, precisely 40 years earlier, when the sky over the Normandy countryside had begun filling with thousands of Americans and Brits, leaping out of an armada of aircraft, floating down to a land that was not their own. They had come to free it. So had the thousands of other Americans who, a few hours later at dawn, stumbled out of landing craft beneath the Vierville bluff and onto a beach being cross-stitched by German machine guns, mortars and artillery. That beach would be known forever more, even to the French, by its invasion code, the name of a place in the American heartland, Omaha. Many of the Yanks coming ashore were Virginians and Marylanders, because the 29th Division was among the attackers, and its main combat units consisted of two regiments of Maryland's National Guard and one of Virginia's. And now, just past midnight four decades later, someone in the bar raised a glass. "To the Americans," he said. We were confused. Which Americans? Had someone come in? The other patrons turned, arms raised. And drank to the two of us. I can't replay that moment without getting teary. The gratitude of a room of Frenchmen for the selfless act of a distant people was so genuine that I wanted to hug them, to say it was nothing, though of course it was everything in the world to them. “
From here...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...220d3e9/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eac8954cad5e
