We are proud of what they did on June 6.

Combat wreckage, historic artifacts, and memorial sites told me a lot about the Allied landing at Normandy, but what I learned from men who were there at the time dominates my mind. We were on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, last year. So were many of the veterans of Operation Overlord, and I sought them out to listen with profound respect. The bravery, heroism, and actual accomplishments of Allied personnel in the Normandy landings will forever be one of our finest hours.

While viewing the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches Les Bains on Juno Beach, I saw a veteran of the U.S. 90th Infantry Division. Having been aware that World War II veterans are reported to be currently dying at the rate of 1,200 per day nationally, I was interested in his unit. I wondered what kind of subsequent death rate they have had, even beyond the combat fatalities of Overlord. I asked him if he happens to know how many participants in the operation with his division are still living.

He broke down and cried, unable to talk. I took him aside and sat him down and waited for him to recover. Did he want to talk about it? He nodded in agreement. He doesn’t know the answer to my question. What he was thinking about, when he broke down, was something more distant from this day and more immediate to the experience.

This old man had landed on neighboring Omaha Beach on D-Day +1 and went to a replacement unit to be assigned to the Division. After the war when he was reading the record of the operation, he learned that the day he reported as a replacement his life expectancy was thirty-six hours--day and a half. If he had known this then, he would have had no reason to believe he would be alive at the end of the next day.

Fifty-seven years later it was, he still wondered how he had survived. More upsetting: Why? Not simply why still alive, but alive at all. Why was he, of all men, not killed with the others? He still doesn’t understand why he should have lived more than thirty-six hours, which is much more troubling than simply why he had lived an additional fifty-seven years.

As I have each time I talked with these veterans, I felt humbled and filled with a profound sense of gratitude. It matters little what they have done in the years since. I feel honored just to meet them for what they did that day. I wonder if I could have done what thousands of them did. Yet, it has been unnecessary for me to land at Normandy under those impossible conditions precisely because they did.

Many were decorated, and some went on to higher ranks and greater responsibility. Yet, I don't know there is much any of them have done since that can stand up to the honor of this particular D-Day June 6, 1944.

Dr. Wallace Alcorn’s columns appear in the Herald on Mondays