When I think about Memorial Day my mind goes back to an afternoon I spent at the American military cemetery at Omaha Beach. On that vast plain of 9,386 white marble crosses, every day is Memorial Day.
It was the spring of 1994, and I was there to write a magazine article about the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy. I knew that the media would reconstruct the larger saga of D-Day: the armies massed in England, the mighty armada crossing the Channel, the troops wading ashore in a hail of Nazi gunfire from pillboxes on the cliff. I decided instead to focus on the last resting place of the men who died in that assault, which finally reversed the tide of World War II in Europe; I was a veteran of that war myself. I wanted to find out how the cemetery exerts its continuing power and what it might have to tell me.
The cemetery occupies a tract of American soil, donated to the United States by the French government, just above Omaha Beach–a landscape distilled to its purest elements of earth, sea, and sky.
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