Stepping Onto Normandy Beach

By now it was late afternoon. The cool fog that had proliferated since the early morning had almost completely burned off, and the sun glistened in the sky. Normally after so much travelling I’d start to get tired, but I left plenty in my reserve specially for the last section of the tour. I was softly excited, but a bit uneasy. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not from the place but from myself.

The van stopped, and my French tour guide and the three other passengers got out. We walked twenty yards to a road parallel to the sea. Then I finally saw it with my own eyes.

Omaha Beach.

Last semester I had the opportunity to study abroad in London. For my spring break (don’t worry, I did other stuff too) I got to finally to visit the number one place I always wanted to go to as a history buff: Normandy beach. I booked a tour in Bayeux, France, of the American sector of the D-Day landings from June 6, 1944. My only regret from the entire trip was that I didn’t spend more time there and visit the British and Canadian sectors as well.

It was a historian’s dream, and the experiences I had earlier that day already left me awestruck. I had been into the church of St. Mere-Eglise where the 82^nd Airborne landed, Utah beach where my great-uncle landed 73 years ago, and the Point du Hoc where the US Army Rangers scaled the cliffs in order to destroy German heavy guns, to name a few. But I couldn’t really believe I had been to Normandy without visiting one of the most enduring and visceral symbol of the entire war, let alone the landings themselves. Now I was finally here.

Where I stood, there was a German bunker and war memorial to my left. To my immediate right was a road stretching behind the beach with a bluff and several houses laid out behind it. And in front of me was the beach. The first thing that strikes you about it is its sheer vastness. It’s both incredibly deep and wide, with the waves breaking off so far that there are hardly any tide pools at all. However, the water clearly washed up very close to shore, on account of the smoothness of the sand.

After a few words and some more gazing, heart pumping I finally stepped onto the beach. Perfect footprints were left in the sand and not a grain of it ended up in my shoes. Our tour guide led us to the middle of the beach about fifty yards in. For the next fifteen minutes, the tour guide shared more details and period photos of the invasion. With each minute I was able to imagine myself even more vividly in an American soldier’s shoes. It was astounding and spine-chilling.

Imagine you’re where I am, which would be closer to the cliffs than where the first soldiers landed. You would be knee-deep in water, weighed down by loads of equipment. Ahead of you are mines, anti-tank emplacements, and barbed wire. Each minute, more and more Germans are pouring machine gun fire straight on you from the bunkers ahead. And perhaps worst of all is the sheer distance you have to go—hundreds of yards ahead of you into the fire. If you can't imagine it, maybe this will help. I could not stop thinking about how $%&*#@ I would have been.

As I turned and looked out towards the sea and thought about the countless lives’ lost on this beach. Prior to arriving, I figured if there was going to be a single time I would straight-up break down and cry it would be now. But what I was going through instead surprised me. I can’t quite explain it, perhaps it was mindfulness or just an enormous sense of gravity. I would describe it like as if you were standing at the top of a mountain and looking upon the world below. You can’t judge it or connect it to anything or really think about it at all very much. All you can do is just take it all in.

The next thing I did surprised me even more. I took several steps away from my group. I remembered I had a zip lock bag in my pack. Without thinking I reached down and grabbed a handful of sand, and then another and another. The sand was golden brown and seemed to have broken shells in it, wet from the sea. I closed the bag, put in in my pack, then walked off the beach, catching up to my tour guide.

We still did other things for the tour, including visiting the gorgeous American cemetery just behind the beach. That was incredible too, but nothing I did after—or really, ever—will compare to stepping on Omaha beach myself that day and seeing it with my own eyes. That sand sits in the bag on my bookshelf, still wet with the water from the English Channel. It's a reminder to me of what I experienced that day and what those men did for you and me all those years ago. I will never remove it.