NORMANDY, FRANCE

JUNE 7, 1994

The tourist bus rumbled for Colleville, the American cemetery near Omaha Beach. Corporal Rick A. Harmon, a paratrooper with the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, leaned over to talk to an old man and his wife.

“You’re Americans?”

“Yes.” The old man smiled. “From Michigan.”

“Isn’t it great here?” The young soldier pushed his cap up. “Different feeling in Normandy, you know? I’ve been to Paris, been all over France, and they don’t treat Americans there the way they treat ’em here.”

“Are you here on your own, or with your men?” the old lady asked politely, in a charming French accent.

“Goin’ to Colleville to look up a grave of one of my dad’s buddies. We were here for a commemorative jump with my platoon on D-Day, at Sainte-Mère-Église. They dropped us in the same location they dropped the Eighty-Second, fifty years ago. It was pretty cool. Did you see it?”

“No, we were in Bénouville for D-Day celebrations,” the old man said.

“Where?”

“It’s a little town not far from Ouistreham—near Sword and Juno.”

“What’s in Bénouville?”

“A bridge called Pegasus. Used to be called the Caen Canal Bridge.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Not many Americans have.” The old man reached to shake his hand. “Tom Jaeger. This is my wife, Brigitte.”

Tom and Brigitte visited the Colleville cemetery, where, in the acres and acres of white crosses, and with the aid of information guides, they tracked down the graves of Lieutenant Kirk Oswald and Captain Bill Fitzgerald, both killed in action on June 6, 1944. They went down to Omaha Beach, and for one of his fellow fighter pilots who flew missions over Omaha on D-Day, but had never set foot in France, Tom scooped up some of the sacred ground and put it in a film canister.

On D-Day, they had strolled around Bénouville. Brigitte’s home had not lasted long as one of the few Resistance brothels in the Occupation; it was burned to the ground in the fierce fight for the city, fifty years earlier. Some had called it a fitting end for the house of sin. Others, including a Madame Bouvier, were curiously silent.

They went to the place where Tom had stood in the middle of the road, caught between running forward and running back. The hedgerow where he had tried to hide was still there. So was the Mairie, the town hall that had housed German soldiers and Milice.

They went to Pegasus Bridge, renamed in honor of the British Sixth Airborne Division, which had taken the bridge with a small contingent in what turned out to be the spearhead action of D-Day. From there they could see the stately Château de Bénouville along the west bank of the canal, where Madame Léa Vion had run a maternity hospital—and where she had operated Century, a cell of the Resistance. Just past the château, the little stone chapel that had hidden downed Allied pilots still stood.

Before they left Pegasus Bridge, Tom thought about a hill in Gettysburg, called Little Round Top. Tom looked toward the sea, toward the beaches, Sword Beach in particular, the easternmost end of the D-Day operation. Had Chamberlain allowed Little Round Top to be taken, the Rebel army could have flanked the Union army; had the brave men of the British Sixth Airborne not taken and held this bridge, the operation could have been flanked with panzers on those beaches, a horrifying addition to the horror of that day.

Tom smoothed his hand on the steel guardrail, and whispered, “Thanks, fellas.”

There wasn’t much left they remembered of Caen. The city had been leveled in diversion attacks on D-Day and in the weeks of battle that followed. The Gestapo headquarters was gone. The Cimenterie office was gone. So was the grave of André Besson.

They visited Cabourg.

It was easy to find her grave in the little churchyard. A distant avalanche of red plastic poppies, some bright and new, some faded pink, showed the way. On the way there, Brigitte stopped at another grave and read the inscription.

A. W. Whilty

June 6, 1944

Age 19

Yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it.

And what is more, you were a man, my son!

They chose this grave to represent Rafael’s and laid upon it a garland of white carnations.

Some wreaths at her graveside had the names of squadrons or divisions. Some inscriptions were jotted on flat pieces of wood, like large Popsicle sticks, and stuck into the ground. Thank you for saving my husband. Thank you for saving my dad. Thanks for saving Grandpa.

Antoinette Cornelia Devault

1876–1944

Connue de ses garçons comme Clemmie.

Brigitte squeezed his arm.

“What’s it say?”

“‘Known to her boys as Clemmie.’”

Tom knelt beside the grave. And after fifty years of rehearsing his speech, he couldn’t say a word.

Next to many others on the white marbled stone, he laid an old button.