Two minutes until we measure a yesterday by the weight of wet sand beneath our feet. A white sky, white clouds, white raindrops, maybe a white sun if it ever appears. Wind-chapped grass awaits the lotion of raindrops. We mount one of the hills above the beach—it stretches for miles until it eclipses with that white horizon—and we stare at an ocean. The wind dribbles sugar-sand over our shoes; we sink a little.
One minute until we descend down the dunes, down into decades ago. But we stop awhile for reasons we don’t say. This canvas of saltwater before us means we can each paint a spot with our eyes to pass the seconds. In my mural, I see a person swimming (Is it me? In the soggy denim and Nikes?) and swimming in the salty gelatin until land evaporates. No minutes left, so time to go.
We slip down the hill to the beach, carrying this Thanksgiving Day 2002 on our backs and this June 6, 1944 in our cupped hands. They call it D-Day. The name did not mean anything. The United States military men used “h-hour” and “d-day” to keep war plans covert, which left battles and muddy camouflage under this meaningless guise. Historians say this D-Day can translate to “day of invasion.” I say many blood-splattered words start with “D.”
The five of us stagger out along the shore, each taking a plot of beach for ourselves, never mixing footprints. Dad leads this procession that will walk the beaches of Normandy and pretend that we know what happened here. I follow next, knowing that the friction of waves will eventually throb in my ears, so I’ll want to ask questions to soothe the sound. My little brother, Ryan, walks behind me, dragging a stick in the sand and drawing a line that dissolves with every wave. His seventh-grade history class hasn’t discussed this day yet; he doesn’t know the boats decorated with mosaics of bullet holes or the beating pulses of the paratroopers dropped behind German lines. This beach means something, he must think, when he bends to retrieve a gray rock to add to his drooping pockets. Britney and Mom walk behind us, 15 and 45 years old, with saltwater nibbling their pant legs. We all stop for a second because it seems right. Mom says, “It was a day just like today. Did you know that?” She squints into the clouds, and Ryan grinds his stick a little deeper into the sand.
We know it by feeling, not by textbooks. True either way. The June 7, 1944 edition of the Detroit News wrote that the D-Day invasion began at six in the morning in “cloudy daylight.” Clouds (check), daylight (check), but my watch glows ten o’clock. We don’t see the 150,000 sweaty hearts, the 150,000 kisses on crucifixes to please get us out of here, but otherwise yes, it was a day just like today. Journalist George Hicks, embedded on the deck of an American ship during the invasion, reported live on radio to hungry ears back home the “ships lying in all directions, just like black shadows on the gray sky.” These white clouds above us create identical shadows, and they look like dogs, creatures slurping their blood from open wounds. Really, Mr. Hicks, no time has passed.
We continue then, on and on with sodden footprints even though there’s nothing to see. We can watch the waves, but they go back and forth until it stings our eyes to watch any longer. Catching up to Dad, I shoot question after question into the air, pulling thoughts from my mind like stubborn slivers and asking what I already know the answer to just to keep the words coming. Dad knows everything (at 17, I remain certain of this) so I ask what I know requires thick, wool scarf responses. We can unravel while we walk. I reach and grasp for these gauzy strips of history to make these beaches real.
An hour later, we stand outside this beach’s museum, a white block building abandoned during this tourist off-season. In solemn adornment, a lone American military boat waits near the entrance. I reach a finger out to touch this boat like Dad does, one hand at his side and one hand tracing this blue Easter egg paint. This is a boat, used in a war.
“This is a boat,” Dad says, “where the front door opened up like this. So if you were first to unload, you took the bullets for everyone else.” He steps away and points to where the open door of the boat purges into the yellow grass, almost ingrown; a simple rectangle, some sort of physics made it amphibious.
Temper like a blister, but mind seeping with imagination, the red-haired entrepreneur Andrew Jackson Higgins invented this boat in the 1920s. First try, he built the boat in his basement but forgot he would have to remove it from his house. Solution? Knock down a wall and haul it out through the hole. The United States Marine Corps became his first customer, and they bought the boats to transport soldiers and equipment to the beaches. One boat could carry 8,100 pounds of cargo (the weight of souls not being measurable). They didn’t need harbors; they could slither their way into Normandy. Years after the war ended, President Eisenhower declared Higgins “the man who won the war for us.” A sort of legacy that makes you shift in your seat a little upon hearing it—the very boats heralded for saving the victims of a world war made victims out of their own sailors. Higgins invented boats that saved lives while slaying them too.
“Can you imagine? Think of opening that door … you were right there for the bullets to get you,” Dad says, eyes wide and head shaking. “A slaughterhouse.”
We enter the museum. Inside maps hang with red thumbtacks and photos of soldiers with eyes like black tide-pools. A secretary shuffles papers at the desk, but no one else wanders this Normandy when we do. The gift shop stands to our left, where racks of postcards sway (you wouldn’t write, wish you were here, would you?) and the sleeves of Omaha Beach T-shirts look frayed from too many summer-popsicle fingers. For five euros, you can buy your own miniature American paratrooper. At a factory just outside Paris, pin-pricked fingers sewed the 101st Airborne Division into little dolls, stapled price tags through their soft felt ears and called them real.
Picking one up Dad says, “This is how we remember them?” I can’t bring my hands to touch the little vinyl parachute on the soldier’s back. I remember that when President Ronald Reagan commemorated the 40th anniversary of D-Day, the wind blew hard like it does today. He stood at a podium near the beach and said, “President Lincoln reminded us that through their deeds, the dead of battle have spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could.” Watching Dad place the paratrooper back in the mountain of its plush brethren, I think to myself that we, in declaring them here as souvenirs, have spoken for them too.
The problem with our own legacies: We don’t always get much of a say in their creation. We do what we can while we live—showcasing our quirks or performing our own magnificent feats, whatever they are, to catch someone’s attention. We try to imprint our image on someone’s brain and thus solidify ourselves in someone’s forever. We find a way (some inherent force that squeezes our lungs and jams its way up our throats and says, “Go, find a way”) to make ourselves distinct. Then we leave, and those who remain sculpt our remembrance with the soft pads of their fingertips.