D-Day

June 6, 1944.

Eighty years ago.

Can it really be that long?

Thousands of teenagers saved the world from a darkness that light might never have penetrated again. The horrors of fascism were blunted with the blood and steel of boys, many of whom were still in high school. Almost none remain today.

The ones who survived and made it home surely left parts of themselves on those beaches. Nobody truly survived D-Day.

The late Andy Rooney, who arrived on the beaches D-Day+4, called it “one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another…..If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach…”

Those rows of crosses can stop the heart.

What that group of 156,000 American, British, and Canadian citizen soldiers did seems almost unfathomable to an infinitely more selfish nation today.