D-DAY

After Ireland and a brief stop in London, we took a helicopter ride over the English Channel to France for ceremonies marking the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The first stop was Pointe du Hoc, where 225 American Rangers had overcome enormous German resistance and climbed a sheer hundred-foot cliff to gain a critical foothold during the early hours of D-Day. More than 100 died or were injured during the climb.

Sixty-two of the survivors were there for the anniversary. With gray hair and faces weathered by age and life's experiences, they might have been elderly businessmen, and I suppose some of them were; but these were the boys, some of them just starting to shave at the time, who had given so much, had been so brave at the dawn of the assault. On that windswept point for which so much blood had been spilled, I tried to recount the story of their bravery. I think it was an emotional experience for all of us.

Afterward, Nancy and I entered a massive concrete pillbox from which, when dawn broke, German soldiers had first seen the five thousand ships of the invasion fleet. Then we flew to Omaha Beach, which was a heartbreaker - the sight of endless rows of white crosses and stars of David - more than nine thousand of them, and they represented only a portion of casualties of D-Day.

President Mitterrand arrived and together we placed wreaths at a memorial. I gave a speech containing quotes from a letter I'd received a few weeks before from a California woman, Lisa Zanatta Henn. Her father, Private Peter Zanatta, had not yet been twenty when he waded out of a bobbing landing craft in the first wave of invaders at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

In her letter, Lisa said her father always dreamed of returning to Normandy. "Someday, Lisa, I'll go back," he said, "I'll go back and I'll put a flower on the graves of the guys I knew and on the grave of the unknown soldier - all the guys I fought with." But, she said, he had died of cancer a few years earlier without ever fulfilling his dream, and she had written to me to ask if she could attend the anniversary celebration as his representative.

"My father watched many of his friends be killed," she wrote. "I know that he must have died inside a little each time. But his explanation to me was: ‘You did what you had to do and you kept on going.'" All her life, Lisa said, she had heard stories from her father about D-Day. "He never considered himself or what he had done as anything special," she said. "He was just an ordinary guy, with immigrant Italian parents who never really had enough money. But he was a proud man - proud of his heritage, proud of his country, proud that he had fought in World War II and proud that he lived through D-Day."

We arranged for Lisa and her family to be a part of our delegation and her words, speaking for her father, somehow seemed to speak for all of the men who had risked their lives that morning in the defense of liberty, including those lying beneath the endless horizon of white crosses. "He made me feel the fear of being on that boat waiting to land," I said, quoting Lisa's letter. "I can smell the ocean and feel the seasickness. I can see the looks on his fellow soldiers' faces, the fear, the anguish, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. And when they landed, I can feel the strength and courage of the men who took those first steps through the tide to what must have surely looked like instant death "

After a few minutes, it was all but impossible to go on. My voice began to crack. But I managed to get through it and was glad when I reached the end: "Through the words of his loving daughter, who is here with us today, a D-Day veteran has shown us the meaning of this day far better than any presidents can. It is enough for us to say about Private Zanatta and all the men of honor and courage who fought beside him four decades ago: We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free."

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster