Ten years ago, as a reporter for a veterans magazine, I had the honor of covering the 50th anniversary of D-Day as aging soldiers gathered.
In the Allied Cemetery at Normandy, France, overlooking the beaches where they fell, many Americans, whose lives were cut so horribly short generations ago, rest. By one grave there was a wilted rose in a rusted vase.
Today the World War II veterans are dying at a rate of more than 1,000 per day, and many of the remaining D-Day veterans are now too old to have made the trip to Europe for today’s 60th anniversary of the invasion. These extraordinary Americans, who saw themselves as quite ordinary, will not be with us much longer.
But the passing of the generation will not mean the end of remembrance. They will live forever young, held in the memory of an ever grateful and humbled nation and a world they saved at such a terrible cost.
When there is no one who loved them to place a flower in sweet remembrance where they have found peace, they will still be cherished.
