D-Day

June 6, 1944 was a great and terrible day. I was just thinking about it this morning. I looked at the calendar and thought today is something, isn't it? Then I remembered. In 1999 the movie Saving Private Ryan came out. Dave and I went to see it on the big screen. It made me think about my grandfather who was stationed in England with the 8th Air Force. When I saw him a couple of weeks later at Thanksgiving I asked him about D-Day. I guess I always thought of it as an infantry thing. In all the years I knew my grandfather I had never asked him about it. So I asked, "Hey, Grandpa, did you fly over France on D-Day?" and in his sort of casual way of talking about the war he said, "Oh, sure." Then he told me about what it was like to be flying above everything. He said it was horrible, that the smoke was thick from the fighting and you looked down and just knew that all those guys were dying down there. I'm glad that my grandpa managed to avoid anti-aircraft artillery.

When I was in France as a missionary, sometimes I would meet an older person who remembered the war clearly. One such person was a lady who had lived under the Nazi occupation and remembered the day that her city in northern France was liberated by allied soldiers. The soldiers were Americans and she told me that she hadn't met an American since that day. I was the first since then. So she thanked me for what our country had done. I wasn't really in a position to speak for the nation but I knew that my grandfather would want to tell her that it was his privilege, so I did. I'm grateful today for those who have "laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom".