What it still means to be an American.
“You are American!” came a voice off to my right.
As I looked through the pouring rain, I saw him. A young man smiling at me and my husband, Chuck. There were two people behind him I couldn’t make out.“Yes, we are,” I said and smiled.
“A day that will live in infamy,” he said and then laughed.I said, “Roosevelt?” and he said, “Yes, I memorized the whole speech. The one when the Japanese bombed your Pearl Harbor.”
As we continued walking towards the shuttle-bus and away from the iconic walls and steeples of Mont St Michel, I said, “You memorized the whole speech? For school?”“No, no,” he said. “I just liked it, so I memorized it.”
“Wow, that’s impressive,” I said. “Most people have forgotten what America did in the second world war, let alone that speech.”
"I don’t think so,” he said, “and, even if they have, history will always remember your sacrifice. You know, you didn’t have to help, but you did. You always do. It’s a great thing about the United States.”
I told him we were on our way to the landing beaches further north in Normandy, to visit the American Cemetery there. I told him it always made me feel patriotic, as well as deeply sad, when I went there.
He nodded and said it was hard for him to feel patriotic in his country when there was so much corruption and greed.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Brazil,” he said and shook his head. He was studying to be a dentist but wanted to move to France. His French was very good, so I said I was sure he would figure it out. He smiled and said he hoped so.
Suddenly he launched into a partial version of FDR’s famous “Flag Day Speech”:
“Grant us the wisdom and the vision
to comprehend the greatness of man’s Spirit
that suffers and endures so hugely for a goal
beyond his own brief span
We are all of us children of Earth
Grant us that simple knowledge
If our brothers are oppressed,
then we are oppressed
If they hunger, we hunger
If their freedom is taken away,
our freedom is not secure . . .
“His parents had been listening the whole time, but not saying a word. At this speech, I looked back and his mother was watching me intently. I smiled and said to her son, “You are amazing. I’ll have to look that one up. I don’t know it.”
He smiled one last time and we climbed down from the bus to go our separate ways.
The next day of our “reconnaissance-trip” to the stops we will be visiting in the spring with a Team Long Run trip, we stood on the very beach that had been the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, -- Omaha Beach.The sky was blue and the water was sparkling. Beautiful sandy beaches stretched out as far as you could see in both directions. There were small boats under tarpaulins that would make up a sailing school as soon as the weather warmed up.
But we knew.
We knew what had happened on this beach in this very spot almost exactly eighty years ago.That 3,686 young Americans had lost their lives or been badly wounded trying to get ashore and establish a beach head. Had fought to liberate a country they had probably never been to, in a war they had only read about in the newspapers. A war that had to end, and it had become their job to end it.
My young friend’s words came back to me as I stood on the beach looking out at the water, “You always do.” And, “History will always remember your sacrifice.”
The ultimate sacrifice of so many of those boys who were barely men.Like the paratrooper in the documentary I had just seen at the exhibition that is part of the American Cemetery.(see photo) The one who had reassured General Eisenhower as he was talking to the troops the night before the invasion with a quintessential Americanism, “Don’t you worry General. We’ve got this.”
And, by the grace of God, they had.
