Matthew Kelly
Les Plages de la Normandie
As we drove through the country side of the Normandy region of France, I was unable to imagine what it would have looked like on June 6, 1944 because of its natural beauty consisting of flowing hills, small villages, and gorgeous pastures. We arrived on Omaha Beach, the location of a barbarian style invasion, thousands of deaths, and surprisingly a vacation area. I added Normandy Beach to my bucket list last year, not knowing I was going to France at the time, and was thrilled to have finally been able to check something off the list. I added it to my list because I find it fascinating that even in 1944, we used barbaric tactics in what was a modern era of war. Men, younger than myself were told to run off a boat, through sand, while shooting a weapon that may become jammed from the salt water and/or sand, run up a hill at an enemy shooting an MG42, and take the village of Normandy. Less than 25% of that sequence seems possible to me but they made it happen. I use the word men for people that were 18 and 19 years old because they were a part of something that people would protest nowadays. They took their orders and followed them with confidence while people in 2017 will protest and argue everything the government does. I was surprised to see that the French people still use Normandy beach as a vacation spot but the more I thought about it I realized that not only was their beach a war zone, their entire country was. As I look at battle fields in the US, from the civil war, I look at them as memorial sights, but not at any time was our entire country run by another empire. (Post-revolutionary war) The French had to rebuild their entire country and move on because it’s all they had, a war-torn country. The way people enjoy the beach is a perfect representation of Normandy, a gorgeous place with a not-so-gorgeous history. This post was truly difficult to put into words and that may be the best way to describe how I felt when my feet touched the sand of Omaha Beach.