D-Day

This weekend I have been cramming my head full of History Channel presentations on the invasion of Normandy, now sixty years distant. Twenty year olds who survived that longest day are now in their eighties, and in short supply.

A family friend, Carl Newkirk was in the invasion. He was on Omaha beach. That, and the fact that he nearly froze to death in the forests of France are all I know of his experience. His generation were pretty stoic.

Another man in our church by the name of Jaycox was there that day. We young punks were running around shooting off fireworks, and my mom asked us to quit.. I asked why, and she said Brother Jaycox (we called each other Brother and Sister in the Baptist church of my youth, a practice I am trying to get started at my current church) was visibly shaken. We took our fireworks off to a different place on the Newkirk's property out of respect.

I met a Sergeant Jaycox at Ft. Leonard Wood years later, and it turns out he was related to Brother Jaycox. Sergeant Jaycox instructed us in some aspect of rifle marksmanship. Small world.

I like to play paintball once and a while, and I am always surprised by how hard it is to not get shot. Teams are usually evenly divided. Unless you have a pile of experienced players on one side, attrition is usually pretty even. Toward the end of the game, either side will have but a handful left, and depending on how they are deployed one flag or the other will be captured. To guarantee victory, one side would have to have almost twice the numbers, or exceptionally well-trained paintballers.

To liberate western Europe, we mostly had numbers and manufacturing might on our side. War planners had to embrace the fact that to wipe out a thousand Huns, you had to send two thousand Allied troops, understanding that you would lose half.

Calling those beaches Hell is a cliché, but a worthy one. A twenty mile sea voyage sloshing through saltwater, vomit and fear, jumping out onto a landscape that had been decorated in all manner of insane structures to defeat oncoming invaders. Intersecting fire that slashed your unit in half, ducking behind a short hill, praying that the bullet with your name on it wouldn't be fired.

All for liberty. I don't know that the Nazis or the Japanese could have conquered the United States, but if German engineering met the resources of Russia, perhaps they could. I believe totalitarianism will collapse on it's own—eventually, but it will bring millions down the drain as it finally dies. Europe did not have to be nearly strangled to death to learn that lesson thanks to the Allies whose eyes fell to the insane beaches of Normandy and rammed themselves head-on into the very throat of war.

God bless them, God bless our freedom. I very much hope to be worthy of the sacrifice.

Tim McNabb