A Day at the Beach

Just a bit of background on this.  While in Europe, I visited several sites in the Normandy region of France where the D-Day invasion took place during World War II.  One of these sites was Omaha Beach, a 5-mile stretch of coastline where elements of the 29th and 1st Infantry Divisions assaulted Nazi forces.  My grandpa Smith was a member of the 1st Division, or Big Red One, and got his first combat experience at Omaha Beach on D-Day.  If you're familiar with the film Saving Private Ryan, that first twenty minutes or so is a depiction of the fighting that took place at Omaha Beach, where Allied casualties were higher than at any of the other five sectors of coastline (code names: Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) attacked during the invasion.  


When I visited Omaha Beach, it was early December and the place was all but deserted.  I had a personal tour guide who showed me around the famous American cemetery, Pointe-du-Hoc, and a few other sites, but when we got down to the actual beach, he could see that I wanted some time alone, and left me to it.  It was very strange, walking on this quiet, tranquil beach and thinking how different it was for grandpa and all the other guys like him when they were there.  I wrote a poem from that context.  It's called, "A Day at the Beach."

I walked along the beach, once soaked in blood

Now pristine, now pretty, and peaceful

A few raindrops drizzled during the day

politely pelting my covered head

where artillery shells once lobbed and fell

where bombs and bullets left so many dead

The tide occasionally crept close to my feet

threatening to dampen the hem of my jeans

The same tide that took hundreds of lives

swallowed young soldiers struggling to climb

out of their 50-pound packs and sacks of ammunition

which pulled even strong swimmers down to perdition

I saw steep rises adorned with stairways

for safe passage from shoreline to ridge

These hills once lined with barbed wire, explosives

Impossible to climb, yet so many did

It was the greatest invasion the world has ever seen

Marvels of modern technology

Man’s mightiest machinations of death

brought to bear on this one shoreline

I cried

I kneeled down and cried

I cried for the fathers

I cried for the sons

I cried for the young men that died

so that you and I

could be here tonight

I cried

and I did the only thing I knew to do

I wrote a message in the sand

that said, simply

Thank you