June 6th

At work today everyone was talking about today being 666 and the re-release of "The Omen". No one mentioned that today is D-Day, too. Maybe I was just thinking about it because I'd watched "The Longest Day" for Memorial Day. As with every time I watch it, I was amused by the near-melodramatic pathos imparted to the German officers-- especially the way their characters repeat certain key lines that the real men probably wouldn't have, like the field marshal who comments about his wife's birthday being "tomorrow, the sixth of june. the sixth of june" as he leaves Paris and the command of the army in someone else's hands. So it's easy for me to remember which day D-Day took place. There won't be a D-Day in the war we're fighting now. No one in the future will ever look back on this and feel the surge of pride that Americans felt, and still feel (I certainly do) when thinking of the vast array of forces that assaulted the Normandy beaches six decades ago. Instead we will look back on episodes like Haditha and feel shame that other Americans perpetrated such acts of violence.

The other day Sara told me that the twin brother of a girl we were friends with in high school, Sandy, died in Iraq recently. I looked it up on Yahoo, and he was a Marine, enlisted right out of high school. I never met him, but in his photo he looked so much like her. The article quoted their father on his pride in his son's actions, and for his sake I'm glad he's proud of his child, but I could only think how enormously betrayed and bereft I would feel, not only to lose my son but to lose him fighting a war with seemingly no end and, two years into it, no more good cause. The death of someone close by, even someone removed a couple degrees of separation as he was, made all this a million times more real to me. He made his choice, of course; at least he wasn't drafted. No one who thinks of those who died in Normandy can say that they died in vain. I wish I could think of the same of him, but I can't.