J4
Loving America more on Independence Day...after a trip abroad to sing America's glories
I have a few pictures for you. I’ll be brief.
I’ll take you to Normandy — little white crosses and a fine mist over Omaha Beach.
What a great privilege to go overseas. To sing! We saw wonderful things in Italy and France. And ended up growing in love for our own country.
It was a blazing hot July in 2016. Angela and I joined singers with her choir, the Valley Choral Society, and with the Schuylkill Choral Society. An unforgettable trip. We sang in the Vatican, at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
We sang. We dined and sipped. The Champs-Élysées. Trevi fountain. Pisa. A Croque Madame sandwich and a cappuccino at a sidewalk cafe in Paris.
Almost too much to take in. It was wonderful.
And then we went to Normandy, to the famed coast, to encounter history, and to sing. After the delights of Rome, Venice and Paris, I began to feel strangely anxious as we drove toward those storied beaches.
As I said, it was hot. Terribly hot. The bus broke down. And its air conditioning kept failing.
Eventually we reached the Normandy shore. It was our privilege to sing our national anthem at the American cemetery there, the resting place of more than nine-thousand soldiers. Americans, who gave their all.
These are the ones whose deaths preserved our lives; the ones who fell at nearby Omaha Beach and four other beaches during the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
A mist began to fall.
We approached the curved colonnade, passing by the Wall of the Missing. It was time for the choir to assemble.
Umbrellas down. Music folders up. In the continuing mist, we sang the anthem.
A small crowd listened. My heart became full. I almost lost control as we sang. Why, after all, were we here? Because this place — for Americans and all free people — was a crux of modern history. A great price was paid here one terrible morning. It was almost too much to contemplate.
We then sang “God Bless America.” Then we walked into the field of white crosses.
The mist stopped.
It’s not far from the cemetery, and the crosses, to the beach itself. There was lump in my throat as we set foot on the sand.
Try, if you can, to picture landing craft hitting these beaches at 6:30 a.m. on 6/6/44. The young Americans splashing onto Omaha Beach encountered the best of the German machine gun units. “They had us pinned down,” recalled Verle Buck of Jubilee, Iowa, then 21 — then entering, with his colleagues, a scene from hell.
“You'd stick your helmet above; they'd shoot a hole through it.”
Imagine: a fusion of terror, hopelessness, and brittle determination. “Then everybody got organized a little bit amongst themselves and knew they had to go because there was no way you could swim that English Channel. You had to go.”
Confusion reigned. Tanks sank in the surf. Smoke everywhere. Noise, screams. And those invisible gunners raining down death from the hill.
More than 2,000 young Americans went down. Verle made it through. (He died in 2018.) 34,000 eventually came ashore. The path to an Allied victory was in sight.
America is now at 250 years. As we celebrate with red, white and blue, incline your hearts, at least now and then, to pondering the red. The meaning of the red, I’m told, is valor. The heroes of D-Day were the embodiment of valor.
I think also of blood, of course. Much was spilled on that infernal beach. What can we say now but “thank you”? We say it to those young men, and to countless others like them, whose deaths in the many battles across our history seem to be as numerous as the grains of sand on Omaha Beach. Freedom is costly.
And I say “thank you” to the Lord of history for His kindness to America.
We sang in the mist. What a privilege. A decade later I am still pondering that trip. And I am grateful.
Thank you so much for sharing this great story. I had a Uncle that died at the age of 21 fighting in France in WWII. I never got to meet him, he was my mothers youngest brother. I do have a picture of him hanging in my Dining Room. My mother all ways had it hanging in her Dining Room and when she passed I decided to hang it in mine in honor of her and her brother. These are the people we need to thank for our freedom.