On June 6, 2008, we will build on the legacy of the courage of D-day.
While we will be meeting at the end of Ocean Park Blvd., in Santa Monica, CA, we invite everyone to "storm" their local beach, and at 12 noon PST, we will take 10 minutes to pray for peace worldwide.
D-Day June 6, 1944
Elek Hartman
82nd Airborne, 508 Co B
In 1993, I was working on two books at once, both would later be published, but one I was struggling with. It was a young adult mystery and my young heroine goes to visit her grandfather, I knew she needed to visit him, but I couldn’t figure out what they were going to talk about. I was struggling with their dialogue when the phone rang. Poppa’s phone call interrupted my inability to write.
“What?” I was crabby.
“Can I bring over lunch?” he asked.
“Poppa, I’m trying to work...” I stated, obviously irritated.
“Oh, okay, another time then,” he hung up.
I glanced at the calendar. It was June 6th. I phoned him back. “Lunch would be great.”
He came to the door carrying our usual lunch, two Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers. He had come to Los Angeles two years prior and stayed to be near me, his only daughter. Poppa was 71, but was ageless in his Singin’ in the Rain show jacket.
“I got you a Sprite,” he said as he placed the food on my kitchen table.
My basenji, Purple, barely raised his head for the visit; Poppa was a regular.
We sat and ate, I told him about my frustration with my book, and that I couldn’t figure out what came next.
He laughed. “Ah, you’ll figure it out. You always do.” He threw his jacket on the back of his chair. “Did the breakdowns come in?”
The breakdowns were the listing for acting jobs that go out to agents; many actors in Hollywood get them to submit themselves for work. Poppa had an agent, but had nabbed several jobs this way. He liked getting the breakdowns, said it made him feel productive. In the early 1990’s they were faxed, and since I had a fax machine, I got them daily for him. I’d often leave them in an envelope for him and he’d pick them up from the mailbox.
Today, I slid the envelope across the table.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a bite of his burger. Poppa was the king of junk food, and whenever he was around I ate it. I must admit that those bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s were good.
“How’s your day going?” He asked absentmindedly as he glanced at the bd’s.
“I told you. Crappy.”
Poppa finished his cheeseburger and rolled up the gold foil paper into a tight ball. He half-smiled as he pushed the bd’s away. “Sorry. You said that. Can I help?”
“Yeah, write it for me.”
He pointed to my burger. “Eat up, Shakespeare. You got words to write.”
I nibbled on my burger. “I’m depressed, can’t get it together.”
“You know what today is?” he asked.
I knew. It was the anniversary of D-day. The --
“-- Single most important day in military history,” Poppa said. “We jumped at what was called H minus five which means it was five hours before the boys would storm the beaches.”
He told me the story every year, but I’d never recalled hearing it in person; it had always been over the phone. As he spoke his face changed to a man seeing the past before him.
“It was fairly quiet as we waited to board the planes. Some bravado, but mostly discomfort. We were, after all, loaded down with our equipment: ammunition, weapons, field equipment. I was Company B’s friendly radio operator, and I was blessed with the additional burden of my radio. The damn thing weighed about 30 pounds.”
I silently ate my cheeseburger as Poppa chuckled. “Oh, and not to be overlooked: our gas masks! I left mine in the plane. Others left them after getting to the ground. It made no sense to have them. We were behind enemy lines. In the middle of the Krauts, they couldn’t very well use gas without harming themselves! Oh, and in addition to the aforementioned equipment, I also had my first aid kit and my jump knife strapped to my leg. That knife came in handy when I had to cut my way out of my tangled chute on the ground.”
“That wasn’t on D-day,” I corrected. “Wasn’t that up in Market Garden? Didn’t you land in a tree?”
He was always annoyed when I interrupted him. “Yes, war expert. Do you want to hear this?”
“Sure, go ahead...” I took a sip of soda.
He was gone again, back in a place that he couldn’t believe he survived. “You know,” he said. “The planes were deafening. You couldn’t talk. We took off from England, and those flyboys just wanted to drop us and go back home. I can’t blame them really. It was dark and noisy. They were called sticks, and only about a dozen or so guys were in each plane. The planes were towing gliders as well. I was in a plane, so it was noisier.” He paused as I finished my cheeseburger. “Do you really want to hear this..?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, you could see cigarette embers in the plane but that was it. But as long as I live, I can still hear the command -- STAND UP! HOOK UP!” He paused for emphasis and I could see him hearing it. In that moment, I heard it too.
“Well, and then the order that was handed down right before we jumped changed my fate.”
“What order?” I asked, not recalling this part.
“Oh, Christ, you don’t want to hear this --”
“Please Poppa,” I pleaded. I was fully involved and didn’t want him to stop. And, as usual, when I pushed, he gave.
“All right, but then I’ve got to get to work.” His hands fell on the breakdowns.
I remained silent.
“You know I was the radio operator. And the jump order was: the lieutenant, me, and then the communications officer. But headquarters radioed down and said that we had to jump in rank order. That meant that the Communications Officer had to go after the Lu, and then me. You following me?”
“Uh, huh.”
“Okay, so the lieutenant jumps, then the Communications officer and then I stepped into the door. At that moment, I saw a tracer go right through him.”
“What’s a tracer?” I asked.
“A bullet. The sky was lit up by tracers.”
“What’d you do?”
“I jumped.”
“What happened to the Communications Officer?”
“I told you, aw for Christ sakes, Tori, he was killed.”
“Wait, Poppa, so you watched him get killed and then jumped?”
“Yes, for Pete’s sake -- the guy was riddled with bullets; cut in half.”
“Wow. So you jumped anyway?”
“Of course I did. I had to.”
“No you didn’t. You could have not gone.”
“Of course I had to go!”
He was really getting irritated by now, as if I’d just said the most preposterous thing imaginable. That someone would or could back out. He would always get irritable when we spoke of the war, but this time I pushed. “Poppa, you chose to go!”
“I’d have been court-martialed if I hadn’t jumped.”
“So you made a choice to go.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. I told you that I had to go.”
I kept driving the point home. He had made a powerful choice and I was determined that he see it. He finally sighed.
“We had to go. We had to liberate people that needed our help. And I had a great deal of empathy for the Jews. Some guys didn’t.”
“Poppa --”
“No. No more. I’ve got things to do today and I’m already going to relive the jump in my sleep tonight, I can feel it coming.”
“I just wanted to say that it’s pretty amazing what you did.”
“I wasn’t alone you know...”
I laughed.
He leaned forward on the table. “You know, that morning, we had driven the Krauts out --”
“From where?”
“Saint Mare Eglise. If you are curious, watch “The Longest Day.” It’s the best film I’ve seen about D-day. Red Skelton played John Steele. That’s the guy who got caught on the steeple and the Nazi’s kept taking pot shots at him.” He smiled, an awkward smile in remembrance, “I stood there on the ground and watched as they cut John Steele down from the steeple that morning. You know, I said aloud, to no one in particular, ‘this is the most important day in military history, and I’m here.’
“Wow, that’s cool.” My words broke the moment.
“Yeah, listen it was all a long time ago, and I’m an old man now. When you’re young you don’t think you’ll die and you don’t care because you have to do what’s right. Better men than I were left behind in Normandy, believe me...”
“Maybe, but you survived to tell the tale.”
“Hmm.” He smiled and reached into his jacket pocket pulling out a small tattered book of Shakespeare. I’d never seen the book that he read from every year. It was the famous speech that King Henry gives before the battle of Agincourt, and it wouldn’t be D-day without it.
Poppa opened the small book, found the page he was looking for and cleared his throat to read:
“He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his friends,
And say, To-morrow is Saint Crispian:
That will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, and say,
These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day; then shall our names,
Familiar in their mouths as household words, - Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloster, -
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son; and Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispian’s day.”
Once again Poppa’s voice transported me to a dramatic place beyond personal comprehension. The words struck me with such passion that I knew what to do with the book I was working on. I would use this speech in my Cara Cosgrow mystery and that proved to be the missing element. In a dramatic sequence, Cara’s grandfather tells her about his experience on D-day and reads from Shakespeare. My problem had been solved.
* * * *
Many years later as I cleared out Poppa’s bookcase, darkness was descending upon his cold New York apartment, and it had begun to snow. I was packing his dusty books, separating my memories from his, and the box was almost filled when I found his tiny tattered copy of Shakespeare wedged between two books.
I began to place it in a box when I saw a makeshift bookmark and stopped. He’d used the old page from the breakdowns on that June day nine years earlier to hold the place for the speech.
I thought back to us at the table and the Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about Poppa living forever in history. I thought about how quickly a life passes and I thought about how well he spent his. I hoped that I could be half the person Poppa had been.