D-Day: What Would You Do?

/ A. M. Watson

Seventeen years old.

You’re some 5,000 miles from home. The listing deck of the ship you’re aboard is tilting from side to side with the swells of the waves, causing your seasickness to be a thousand times worse.

A strangled scream catches your attention. Over the side of the boat, where the rope ladder swings, you watch in horror as a soldier is caught between the side of the boat and the landing craft he was supposed to be descending into. A swell forces the landing craft to slam into the side of the boat, crushing the soldier instantly.

Violent nausea twists your stomach into an upheaval. The incessant throbbing of the guns from the battleships pound in rhythm with your heart.

When your turn comes to climb down the rope ladder into the landing craft below, you pray that you aren’t the next unlucky victim to be crushed between the sides of the two sea-faring vessels. A few inches of water stand in the bottom of the landing craft. You look down to see vomit mixed with the salt water, sloshing around your ankles.

Sick as a dog, you try to push through the group of soldiers crammed around you, hoping to get to the side of the craft before your breakfast reappears. But you can’t get there in time. Instead, you clutch your stomach, knowing that the soldier you just threw up on is just as bad off in that moment as you are.

You can see the shoreline approaching. Gunfire is erupting from all sides. In just a few moments you will plunge into water that rises above your chest, and charge onto a beach littered with mines and barbed wire.

You look around at the soldiers around you and the other landing crafts just as crowded. You are the first wave going in. 95% of you will never make it off the beach. Chances are that you won’t be one of the few that live. You wonder how you’ll be killed.

Will it be your first step on shore, when a landmine blows you apart? Will a bullet from a machine gun nest lodge in your chest, leaving you suffocating slowly in your own blood? Will shards of razor-sharp metal projectiles slice you to pieces?

100 pounds of gear weighs down on your back. But it’s nothing compared to the weight that burdens your mind and soul. The freedom of the world is dependent on you. Most likely you will be required to pay for it with your own life blood.

This is the most pivotal moment of your life up to this point. You can choose bravery, courage, and selflessness. Or you can choose to allow fear to cripple your resolve for freedom.

What will you choose?

Seventy-nine years ago today our grandfathers and great-grandfathers faced those very things and so much more. They were called upon to liberate the oppressed and to protect the free. They were asked to charge into the gates of evil itself.

Many of them were just young boys. Yet they recognized the value and priceless of freedom, and were willing to go through unimaginable horrors to preserve its light for future generations.

“They’re murdering us here. Let’s move inland and get murdered.”

Colonel Charles D. Canham, Omaha Beach

So many of them never made it home. To this day, French citizens go to the American military cemeteries in Normandy and make sure that the graves of those killed in the fight for French liberation are visited and remembered. So many of these soldiers had families in the United States who were never able to travel to France to see the grave where their loved one was laid. In their stead, French citizens come and lay flowers on the graves in gratitude for the lives given so that they could be free.

What’s so remarkable though is that our soldiers considered their sacrifice well worth it, if because of it freedom’s torch still burned brightly for another generation to see.

As I’ve said before, two of my great-grandpas saw combat at Omaha beach on D-day. One of them was in the first wave of soldiers to hit the beachhead, and was among the few who survived to tell about it.

Liberty was secured for us that day. It was truly a magnificent display of valor and courage.

Remember their sacrifice today.

A. M. Watson,

Hebrews 13:8

6 thoughts on “D-Day: What Would You Do?”

  3. We can never truly grasp their sacrifice! They were scared but willing to go anyway. They were selfless, not to be compared to our selfish, self serving, self focused, selfie taking generation of today. True heroes! We all owe them a debt of gratitude.
    Thank you for the thought provoking post. Now I am going to watch ” The Longest Day”.

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