The important thing today is to do your own remembering,

so I'll do what I can off the top of my head.

This is the sixty-first anniversary of the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of the world.

The Allies had already pretty-much conquered Italy and had landed in Southern France. I think Audie Murphy had already performed the actions that won him his Medal of Honor. (He's not that clear on which awards he earned for what in his book, the way he tells it, in the hot periods he just ran - or crawled - a lot and shot whatever weapons he came across. Maybe this link would be better.)

I am mistaken, Murphy won the CMOH for his actions near Holtzwihr France, 26 January 1945.

[If you want to read a lot of stories that will bring tears to a grown man's eyes, check out the Congressional Medal of Honor Citations at this site.]

Many wonderful, brave men faced their worst fears in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 1944. They faced bombs and bullets and seasickness. Many tens of thousands died before they had to opportunity to return fire. But so many survived to fight and turn back the evil of Nazism that had conquered the European continent.

The CMOH site tells a few of those stories, but there are many more who performed equal tasks and won lesser awards, and many more heroes than that who remain unsung.

How many of them refuse to speak because they consider that their actions would be tainted in the eyes of civilized people in peaceful times?

Should they speak? To those of us who will never see the same situations? Probably not. It's better that we that we master our own specialties. But we must understand, as well as we can... We must learn about the hell of war.

And we must be prepared to fight it ourselves, should it come to us. To fight war and to fight in war.

To that end, you have to read War Is A Racket, by Smedley Butler.

The Smedly Butler Society. (I just now discovered them through a Google search, so I can't vouch for them.

Hmm. A very interesting bit of history from Clayton Cramer.