Held to answer

Here they come, the last members of that over-hyped “Greatest Generation” to celebrate America’s longest and finest day.

That’s how the publicity and remembrances of June 6, 1944 may seem to some of the grandkids and great grandkids of that generation.

“That was 70 years ago. Let’s move on,” someone said to me last month, when I mentioned we were coming up on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

Seventy years from now, what significant dates will today’s surviving 20-somethings look back on? What anniversaries will they celebrate? The day the first black man took the oath of office for president of the U.S.? The technological victories of Microsoft and Apple and Facebook?

“America’s power is what is keeping the world glued together,” journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger said this week while visiting Portland.

It has been that way since D-Day.

Now, in 2014, after too many political interventions and ill-conceived wars, America’s glue is disintegrating. Read any of the best histories of D-Day, and note the comparisons between then and now.

Go to Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day” and read of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s agonizing preparations and decisions leading up to D-Day. Had it not been successful, he had prepared a statement: “The troops, the air and Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

When it proved successful, neither Eisenhower nor his president, Franklin Roosevelt, gloated under a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

And at least some of America’s political elite shared in the sacrifice 70 years ago. Among those on Normandy that day were Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, the former president’s son, who landed with the first wave of troops on Utah Beach, while Gen. Roosevelt’s son, Capt. Quentin Roosevelt, landed with the 1st Division on Omaha Beach. (Gen. Roosevelt would die a month later from a heart attack.)

Mostly, though, it was ordinary Americans, Brits and Canadians who liberated France and stopped the Nazis.

My father, who was drafted into the U.S. Army and served as a replacement rifleman in the 1st Division, landed with the second wave of troops on Omaha Beach.

He never talked about the war. He only dropped bits of memory into conversation: Watching townspeople in a French village shave a young woman’s head and smear black grease over her head as punishment for consorting with a German soldier. Seeing German citizens pulling leaves off trees to boil and eat. Taking special care of his feet so he wouldn’t get frostbite.

He grew up an Arkansas country boy, and his family moved around Oklahoma, Mississippi and California looking for work. One of his sisters recalled that he didn’t mind being drafted; he sent home a monthly allotment to help the family.

When I look at photos of the Normandy invasion, it’s some comfort to know my dad had lots of company. He was surrounded by guys like himself. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there were probably no Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives on Normandy’s beaches. They were guys trying to survive.

Years later, married with a family, my dad settled down with a steady job at a lumber mill in Southern Oregon. He liked to read pocket Westerns. The only war book in our house was a thick magazine-sized paperback with a red cover and a black swastika inside a white circle. “The Nazi Tyranny” was 96 pages of black-and-white, gruesome photographs. The faces are not disguised. Nothing is censored.

I was drawn to this magazine the way some kids today are drawn to violent videogames. I couldn’t look away from the photos – kids my age, who were balding and had the bony hands and arms of old people. A jar of human soap. A mounted head. Burned bodies of people who tried to escape. It was my first lesson in what people were capable of doing to one another.

I still have that magazine. The gory photographs don’t shock anymore. What’s more frightening are the smiling, confident faces of the Nazi victors when they were still winning.

What would the world be like today if they hadn’t been stopped?

That question seems almost irrelevant. Our wars and political interventions since World War II have diminished the historic sacrifices those ordinary men made.

Just as disturbing are the changes in our culture and daily lives. We have trouble dealing with even small evils.

Here in Oregon, Gov. John Kitzhaber can’t bring himself to sign the execution papers for a twice-convicted murderer on Death Row who has asked to die.

More recently, there has been national agony over whether the drugs used to humanely euthanize our pets might cause too much pain to Death Row inmates. It’s believed one rapist-murderer might have suffered for 15 minutes when he was executed in Ohio. At least he wasn’t in Normandy where medics closed some wounds with safety pins and had to leave the dying to die.

In his words to the troops before the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower said, “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

What have we done with those hard-won liberties? We use more drugs. We have more babies growing up with less parenting, even though we have better birth control. We can’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. (Yesterday, a man in Seattle shot four persons and killed one. Within 24 hours, there were calls to forgive the gunman.)

My father rejected any notion of a “greatest generation.” In his last years, he worried about how his grandkids’ generation was going to live.

He never graduated high school, yet he understood that some missions are never accomplished.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons