Normandy 5/25/08

I got up to catch my train at around 9am. I was still a little tired from my adventure last night, and didn't sleep really all that well as it turned out, so I tried to catch a nap while having some time to kill on my two hour trainride. Unfortunately, the 4 teenage girls who sat next to me wouldn't allow for much sleep. They gabbed on and on, laughing loudly and speaking in screeching tones. The older lady across from me didn't seem so happy about it either, and together we made faces at eachother, conspiring to kill them all and finally get some rest. Soon enough however, we arrived at the station in Deuville. It was a very small Norman town, like the Villas in Alsace. It seems like there are a lot of little towns like that in France. When I entered the station, I was looking for something resembling tourist information, but that was nowhere to be seen. I looked around to find some kind of tour, or at least an advertisement of the Normandy Beaches, but still nothing. This seemed strange to me, because I'd figured that the Beaches of Normandy would be a major tourist stop along this area, and so would thusly be posted and advertised on everything. On the wall of the train station was a huge, old looking map which covered it. In the center it had the town where we were, Deuville. My eyes dragged up the coastline looking for that famous hump of land jetting out into the English Channel. That's where I knew the big landing site was, but I couldn't find that place on the map. "That's strange," I said to myself, and began wandering outside the station to find some place which may have someone who speaks English, to tell me where I need to be. A little ways down the road was a hotel sitting just across the street from the french coastline. I walked inside and found the reception. The receptionist was busy talking to some customers, checking them in or out, I don't know which, but i found a large laminated book of "Things to do in Deuville" and began flipping through it to find the beach landings. I still hadn't found anything when it was finally my turn to speak. I asked the receptionist how I could get to the famous WW2 beaches, and listed them off, Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword, Juno. She paused for a moment and her eyes dropped, as they sometimes do when someone is delivering bad news. "That's a long way from here," she said being careful. "How far?" I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. "At least another hour and a half." Well that wasn't so bad, I suppose. It was still pretty early, and I had some time. "How can I get there?" I asked back. "Do you have a car?" "No" I answered. "Oh," her eyes sunk again, "Then you'll have to take the bus." I inquired as to how exactly I do that and she didn't know. She just told me where the bus station was, and that I'd probably have to take that into a closer city, and then take some sort of local transport bus to the actual site. It seemed like a little bit of a process, but I was here now, there was no turning back.

I walked back to the trainstation, where the bus station resided on the back side. The actual building where you buy tickets and get information was closed today because it was sunday, however thankfully the buses were still running. Since traveling, Sunday has become the most hated day of the week. It's a traveler's friday the 13th. Nothing works, and everything's closed. There's no one avaliable to help, and all the rooms in the city are fully booked. Sunday can be the unholiest of days when you're lost and just looking for a little grace. A lady bus driver was sitting in her bus parked on the corner with the door open, so I walked over there hoping to possibly get some sort of information out of her. She spoke very little, almost no English at all, so it became very difficult to exlain to her exactly what I wanted to know. I tried to dumb down my words as much as I could, but how exactly do you explain that you want to know the schedules to get to the Normandy beaches without using English? I couldn't really aid myself with hand gestures. I would have had to reenact the landing right there on the curb, and she would have thought I was a lunatic. thankfully, she was very nice and tried to be as helpful as she could. I decided I'd better just pick a specific beach and just go with that, because it'd be way easier to ask how to get to, and I probably now only just had time for one beach anyway. I picked, arguably the most famous one, the one I was most interested in, Omaha beach. "I'm trying to get to Omaha Beach," I said as slowely and clearly as I could, being careful not to say it loudly or talk down to her rudely, as many American tourists have a habit of doing. She seemed to understand Omaha, and she got up out of her bus, and lead me over to where a list of bus schedules was posted. "Caen," she said and pointed to the number of the bus I was waiting for, and then to the spot she wanted me to wait in. I thanked her. "Once in Caen, where do I go?" She shrugged, and when the bus came to take me to Caen, I asked the bus driver the same question, and he gave the same response. "Ok well it looks like I'm going to Caen," I thought to myself.

Along the bus ride to Caen, I passed through several small towns and Villas I knew the names of through watching the history channel and playing WW2 themed video games. These farmlands and friendly looking villages were once, not so long ago, wartorn battlefields. So many of the fields where cattle sat grazing, looked exactly like the fields portrayed in Saving Private Ryan, and were actually those same fields, but here I was seeing them for real. I tried to imagine what it must have looked like back then. It seemed like it was probably almost about the same as it was now. It didn't seem like these little Villas had seen change in hundreds of years. Sure, most of the ruined buildings bombed during the war had been rebuilt, but this landscape I was seeing was more or less probably the same landscape my grandfather's generation fought and died on. It was humbling to think that I may right now be looking at the same sight my Great Uncle Wally looked at when he was exactly my age wandering around with his batalian looking for the Nazi army. I might have just passed a spot where Uncle Wally walked, or fought in one of the countless gun battles he told me stories about. Although, as I found out later, Caen was really more the area where the Brits and Canadians fought after landing in Normandy. The US armies took the road further west to Saint Lo (which I unfortunately didn't get a chance to see this trip). When I entered Caen, the busdriver tried to help me figure out where to go next, but he wasn't exactly sure either. I wandered into the nearby train station and asked an attendant there how to get from here to Omaha Beach, and he told me I actually need to take the train in a little ways to Bayeux. Then from there, I learned that only the taxis were availiable (because it was Sunday) to take people up to Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery. At the station in Bayeux I traded in my ticket coming back from Deuville, for one which goes right out of here. Amazingly, the switch was pretty easy. I just had to pay a couple euros extra for a little extra distance. Outside, I waited forever for a taxi to finally make it this far out. I waited with two other tourists who were traveling to the same place. The one woman was a rather boistrous Texas woman, which I actually very much apprechiated because her southern outgoing adittude made up for my lack of things to say after having taken the very long route through Normandy. The man with her, was a middle-aged Native American man from Arizona. Together the 3 of us shared the one taxi which finally pulled into the station, and so we split the fair 3 ways.

By the time I finally made it to Omaha Beach I had taken 2 trains, a bus, and a taxi. I'd gotten to see 3 other towns in Normandy along the route to Omaha beach, essentially taking the route the allys took, but in the opposite direction. When we exited the taxi, we decided on a time for us all to meet back at this spot which would give us time enough to catch our trains home. We said goodbye until later that evening, and then parted to go exploring our separate ways. The first thing I did, was head straight ahead to the visitor's center. Inside there's a small museum-like exibition of a complete history of D-Day, artifacts retrieved from the beach, as well as recorded stories given by some of the veterans who were there. It was incredibly emotional, it was so right there in your face. I've heard the story so many times before, and listened to people talk about their experience there, but to be right there looking at the uniforms, equipment, bullet casings, and seeing pictures of the faces of the people being talked about was almost overwhelming. My favorite area, which I spent a great deal of time in, was a little room with a bench and speakers all around. In the center was a small computer console which had a touch screen menu of buttons on it. Everytime you pushed a button, the voice of a D-Day veteran would come over the speakers and talk about their story of surviving D-Day. On the screen a picture of what they looked like during the war would pop up on the screen. There were probably about 50 buttons, each one with an amazing story of survival. So many of them were incredibly sad, though. According to the museum's tally, about 3,500 Allied soldiers died on just Omaha Beach alone. Every veteran had a story of a close friend they saw killed. One man told the story of how as soon as the landing vehical opened it's front hatch, he watched two friends in front of him completely decapitated by German bullets. Another talked about how as soon as it was time, he ran out the front hatch only to realize he was the only one in his whole craft who exited. No one else even made it to the sand. Story after story of these tragic and grousome experiences. I can't even imagine the utter hopelessness it must have looked like on the ground. Behind the beach, parachuting in, the airborn wasn't doing much better. They were missdropped, and lost. Some of them drowned in fields flooded by the Germans, others were just shot from the sky like clay pidgeons. For that one entire day, it was absolute pandemonium. At the end of the museum, is a long hallway to the exit. Over the loudspeakers they list off the names of the soldiers who died that day, on a constant loop.

Walking away from the museum, I caught my first glimpse of that famous coastline. I was star struck, to be honest. I felt so excited that I was here seeing the site of what I always thought was the most interesting battle of WW2. My excitement was mixed with a terrible solumn feeling in the pit of my stomach, as my mind reenacted scenes of D-day using the backdrop of the actual battlefield. I imagined, from up here, the German perspective and what it must have looked like seeing tens of thousands of soldiers pile out onto the beach, and slowely eek their way up closer, and closer. What would have been my reaction to the sight of hundreds of battleships, and landing craft lined up on the Ocean? How would it be to see nothing but young men being torn to pieces on a beach all day, and hear nothing but their screams mixed with explosions and gun shots? What do you even think about during something like that? These questions are ones I had asked myself before, but right here they came to life before my eyes. I wandered up to the American Cemetery, and as I entered I put on my headphones and played "Hym to the Fallen," which is the theme song to Saving Private Ryan, on my iPod. The little white crosses were layed out along the green grass. They were so many, you couldn't see where the end was. Stuck in the ground next to each one was a small American flag, along side a French one. I wandered aimlessly, looking through thousands of grave stones, reading the names, and trying to piece together (judging by job, rank, and date of death) how and where he might have possibly met his end.

When I felt ready, I finally walked the trail down to the beach. When I stepped into the sand, I was caught off guard at just how soft the samd was. Most of the beaches I'd been to in France were rocky, and coarse. This sand was like flower; piles and piles of it. I stepped out onto the beach, and took my first panoramic look around. Right on the spot where I was standing, was where thousands of kids my age lay dying "screaming for their mother" as several accounts said. This water washing up at my feet was at one time mostly blood. My Uncle Wally may have bled right here in this water, and hauled himself up on this sand. It was surreal to me. As I walked around, I did some more imaginary reenactment. The thoughts came like memories. I felt like I'd been there, only like a fly on the wall, experiencing it from a distance. I pictured the faces of my friends on the ghost images around me, and saw them fall like fine china on a tile floor. I stood still and heard the explosions and gunfire. I wondered when it was my turn. It was low tide by the time I walked along the beach, the same as it was that day, so I got to see a very unique view of the whole stretch of sand that they ran in open fire to reach the sea wall on the other end. It was an amazingly long distance from the water to the sea wall, I hadn't realized it was so far. As an experiment, I walked down to the edge of the water, so that my feet were just slightly submerged. I turned toward the sea wall where the safe cover would be on the beach, and I timed myself running as fast as I could to that sea wall. When I made it to the end where a soldier would have had some kind of chance at cover, I had been running for just about 20 seconds. This meant that an average soldier probably had about 20 seconds from when the landing craft opened, where he was completely out in the open to be shot as he ran to the cover of the sea wall. That's also assuming that the soldier had a perfect exit, and didn't get hung up on the way (which probably didn't happen often). 20 seconds is more than enough time to be shot running. It's only by the grace of God that any of them survived at all, let alone went on to win the battle.

After spending a day in Omaha Beach, my soul was in awe. There were so many questions, and not enough answers. I couldn't fathom the moment, or dipict it correctly in my mind. I felt pathetic trying. The closest I've ever seen of real war has been hollywood special effects. When you see it in a movie and then you walk where it actually happened, you start to sense the disconnect, that no matter how accurate the movie may be, it would never be anything close to the real thing. Before I left, I walked one last time through the field of white crosses, and thanked them for their sacrifice.

I caught my train back to Paris, and just as I stepped onto my platform, I got a call from Kyle and Peter who wanted to meet up with me for a drink. I met them down in Saint Michel, and we hung out at a pub and had a round of beers. We talked and laughed until the early hours of the morning. I'm glad I got to run into them again, and I may run into them also in London, when I'm there for my flight home. I've started really developing a friendship with those guys, it'd be awesome to keep that friendship going.