When I posted Ike’s D-Day message yesterday, my wife came into our modest study and said, “You love D-Day.” It’s true – I love D-Day. I love movies about D-Day, books about it, TV specials on the History Channel, and especially, the photographs from the invasion of Normandy, 6 June 1944. In the photographs is where you really witness it. You see the uneasiness and the true terror of combat on the faces of those brave young men. In their faces, we see real people, not myth or nostalgia so frequent in the captions and descriptions of battle to follow. The photographs are the experience of war before we added the commentary afterward.

I also love what D-Day signifies through that lens of late 20th century myth. I am old enough to remember the commemorations and I am lucky enough to have known people who fought in the Second World War and then went off to seemingly normal lives. One of my great-uncles was shot down and spent 2.5 years in a German internment camp. After the war he became a minister. A good friend of my parents and grandparents, who died only a few weeks ago, was a fighter pilot in both Europe and the Pacific, flying photographic recon and fighter support for bombers. He became an optometrist and spent his post-war years in peace asking children and adults “is this better” as he adjusted their lenses. Another great-uncle, a man I never knew, was a Bronze Star winning infantryman in Patton’s Third Army and was wounded in the Bulge. He became a letter carrier. So many of us have stories like this.

The Second World War was one of national sacrifice. The veteran’s stories remind us of how seemingly normal their extraordinary actions were. Historians like Stephen Ambrose made careers on this theme – that the famed Band of Brothers was a collection of hearty boys who were made into men by the experience of war. Then, their lives went on. It is a tough thing for us to imagine now, the idea of the citizen soldier, because war is supposed to be so transformative, culturally as well as personally, for those who fight in it. After Vietnam, we are consumed, rightly or wrongly, with the internal transformation war has on the individual and the conspiracy of nations to weed out their young in tragic bloodletting. These are debatable and powerful themes and ones we should be discussing.

However, D-Day seems like a different age altogether. I have been to Omaha Beach, to Utah, Sword and to Point du Hoc. I have seen the landscape and the remaining bunkers and shell holes. I have seen the American Cemetery there with its acres of crosses. Yesterday, NPR played Reagan’s speech from 1984 “The Boys of Point du Hoc”, an address that still resonates today. Reagan seems like a relic of a past age as well because politicians don’t speak in grand narratives anymore. Maybe they don’t have the words or maybe they think they’ll appear insincere or won’t be accepted by a cynical public if they talk this way. Reagan took the chance and of all the tributes since 1984 to our “greatest generation”, his is the one we remember from that cliff overlooking the English Channel. He wasn’t a perfect president, but I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan was a man who had that rarest of modern virtues, conviction. For those of you who think that presidential rhetoric doesn’t matter, read the speech.

But we cannot forget the actions that Reagan was honoring and the dead who surely didn’t, in Lincoln’s words, “die in vain”. We memorialize to make sense of conflict, to honor the living as much as the dead, and we construct our historical memory, our narrative, from scraps of remembrances clouded in sentiment. This, however, doesn’t make them less true, gripping, or beautiful in their message and in the scope of their tragedy. Look to the faces of the men waiting to hit the beaches and tell me if it isn’t remarkable today to think that those men from yesterday suffered to free a continent mired in ethnic hatred and totalitarian oppression. It’s easy to speak of freedom but its another thing to volunteer your life for someone else’s. That’s what these men did and this is why I love D-Day.