The Babbler bares his soul

Damian Brooks marks the anniversary of the D-Day landings with some personal insights:

I went to school and came away different, but they went to war. I lost classmates to training accidents, to car accidents, to suicide. They lost comrades to bullets, bombs, and shrapnel, in terrible numbers, day in and day out, for months on end. The stresses my classmates and I endured engendered a lasting camaraderie. How much greater the stresses placed on our veterans, and how much deeper the currents of uncommon experience that draw them together, even now.

After 13 weeks of recruit training, I cried when I saw my family again. Our Normandy veterans left family, country, and safety behind for years; they crossed an ocean; they killed and faced death. They liberated a continent, and in so doing, they changed the course of history. One wonders how they adjusted to some of the inescapably mundane elements of civilian life so shortly after engaging in such a momentous military undertaking.

When you've been forced to decide what is worth dying for at age 21, how does that affect what you believe is worth living for at age 22, or 42, or 82? We are rapidly losing the ability to ask that question of our Normandy veterans, as the natural ends of their lives loom closer with each passing day. Very shortly now, all we will have left is their legacy, an unmatched record of public service in both war and peace.

My brief military service was all spent in Canada, in the Militia. The unit I belonged to had few battle honours from the Second World War, as they had been chosen to provide headquarter guard detachments of platoon and company size to Canadian divisions. We envied the recruits of other units in our brigade which had more glorious recent histories, but the costs of gaining that glory was rarely in our minds. Canada provided a disproportional share of the military effort on D-Day — one of the two best-known battles Canadians took a leading role in — and they paid the costs in blood.