Invading Normandy

NORMANDY, France -- Stuck in my hotel room here in the midst of what
the French call a "tempest," I hate to admit it but I'm enjoying myself.
This place is totally cool -- an old 18th century castle, complete with
a moat and dark, scary looking chambers that seem to go nowhere. All
that and great room service and not so great TV.

But right now I'm happy to have any TV at all, as the power
has gone out in over 50 percent of this part of the country.

I guess I should be a bit more somber. After all, I came up here to
see a very telling piece of history -- the sites of the Normandy D-Day
Invasion.

For some reason, just prior to splitting the good ole US of A for
these shores, I happened to catch Daryl Zanuck's film, "The Longest Day"
(and also the longest movie), about D-Day. Actually, I loved it. It not
only had a cast of thousands, including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Sal
Mineo, Bobby Darin (yes!), Eddy Arnold (no, not the country singer, ya
dummies!), and a host of others. And the film, shot in all the actual
World War II locations, really was quite good -- far superior to
that over-rated piece of Steven Spielberg caca ("Saving Private Ryan").

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But you know what the weirdest thing has been so far about this trip?
Even though I'm right here (my hotel is located in Caen ... a town that
was totally destroyed during the War) I can't get one iota of
feeling that anything actually happened here.

I don't know what it is. I keep on reminding myself that this most
amazing piece of history took place less than 60 years ago! And yet, I
can't feel a thing!

Yesterday, standing on the shores of Omaha beach, the first site of
the Allied Invasion, I had the very same feeling. It didn't help much
that the place is now the site of a luxurious golf course (for some
reason I kept looking for O.J. Simpson). Amidst the old houses in the
town are a host of beautiful, costly mansions.

All that afternoon, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't coax
forward one single smidgen of feeling that anything happened.

See, this is important for me. I'm a real honest to goodness baby
boomer ... born right at the end of the War. Yet, for some reason, I
never grew up with any sense of what had taken place. It was all just
something to read about in the history books.

Europeans don't have that sense at all. Everywhere you turn here --
at least in France -- you are reminded of the war. People still talk
about it. In fact, it is never really that far away. It's hard to
explain, but all I can say is that it's a totally different experience
than it is when one is living in America.

So I guess I'd hoped that traveling to the D-Day beaches would bring
about some real gut feeling of, well, of the horror of what took place.

And here I sit, chomping on potato chips, drinking Coke and watching
a Jackie Chan film. A bit surreal to say the least.

A visit to the War Memorial Museum at Caen didn't really help
matters. In fact, rating that place, I'd give it a D-minus. Overpriced,
and run by a bunch of abominably rude women, the "memorial" consists of
a slew of undersized photos, and a few "real" artifacts -- including a
couple of tanks that really look like they're straight out of
Disneyland. If you want you can watch a D-Day film -- but by the time it
got to that point, I was ready to split.

I guess it must sound like maybe I have a bad attitude. I don't know.
I guess the truth really is that part of me doesn't want to feel -- on a
face-to-face level -- the horror of the war. I wonder if that's not true
of all of us.

It's one thing to watch "The Longest Day" (which really did capture
the reality of battle) and another to feel -- in your soul -- what took
place.

Another thing, and I'll close on this somber note: One thought that
has constantly run through my mind during this journey is the fact the
human nature has not really changed. Oh, we like to think it has; that
makes us feel all nice and secure, but I challenge any one of you to
give me one single bit of proof that it has.

Uh, uh, friends. Homo sapiens have not changed. Nor has the capacity
to do evil lessened one single bit. Which means simply that the
atrocities committed during the war can happen again at any time. And
that is a scary thought.

And one that you don't have to travel all the way to Normandy to
realize.