No Greater Love

My father is not a man taken with sentiment. He has survived his four siblings. One of those, his only brother Martin was in the field artillery of the Virginia National Guard before it was activated into the Army of the US. Martin was lucky as it happened because he rotated out of the Guard and joined the US Navy as a corpsman where he was stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital throughout World War II. If Martin had stayed in the National Guard, there is a high probability that he would have died on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, D-Day. The activated Virginia National Guard was the first to hit the beach at Normandy and sustained massive casualties, serving almost as cannon fodder for the Nazis to exhaust themselves on, before the US First Infantry Division, the Big Red One of the regular US Army cleared the beach. There were, of course, the Rangers, Reagan's eternal "boys of Pointe du Hoc" missioned with an impossible task. There were other landings, Americans gaining Utah without rivers of blood, Gold, Sword, and Juno with allied forces from blitz-battered Britain, Free French, occupied Poland (later so cruelly betrayed), and the Canadians avenging Dieppe, the rehearsal commando raid for D-Day two years before that left so many Canucks dead or captured, with the deepest first day penetration. There were also French resistance fighters risking all to assist with the liberation, and there were the pathfinders, paratroopers, and glider borne troops and their pilots. My father had volunteered as a glider pilot, been one of only four (4) out of hundreds to pass the glider corps academic test, only to find himself declared 4-F for a health concern. It is Lord's grace that I was ever born, as the glider pilots died in droves. Instead, my father served in the Civil Air Patrol, witnessing U-boat attacks off the Atlantic coast. Once in an antique mall, my father found a book, the honor roll of Virginia's World War II dead-not all of them from D-Day including his next door neighbor, a dentist's son with matinee idol looks who became a Navy pilot only to fall in the Pacific Campaign, Buddy Waddell. He read the ranks from Allegheny County, the little town of Covington, the home of his youth, and there among the musty tomes, I saw a tough man weep.