Geranimo!

The invasion on June 6, 1944, was an event comparable to the construction of a large city in a single day - and by surprise - and on somebody else's property. To carry the analogy farther, the property owner would not want your city - and would have an army ready to stop you. Both the invaders and defenders invested uncounted and still uncountable sums of money and performed feats of heroic grandeur. Now, it has become a spiritual thing. It was the closest most people can ever come to Glory. It let people meet each other on a spiritual level that religion will never understand. War starts with cold calculations, then becomes a visceral act, a raging beast beyond control, only accepting input from the human mind related to methods of killing, attacking, surprising, and . . . then somehow, there is a human element that falls from this great fire. And that is one more step for mankind on its long journey.

On D-Day the paratroopers came down. They came down along with bombs, artillery shells, naval bombardment, small arms fire, gliders, and airplanes that fell together with them from the sky. The land here is still filled with holes that tell of great explosions and still quietly scream with agony, still trying to get their story out. Can the tourists hear them? Can they possibly understand? Well, most of the seem to be busy.

There are stories beyond belief, like one guy who got his parachute snagged on a church steeple and was in the process of being shot by a German soldier when . . . but wait . . . if you want to find out the rest of THIS story you need to go to France and look up Roel Klikhamer. He's talked with the guy. He can also tell you stories that are hard to believe and involve sharing of the most human elements of mankind by Germans, Americans and the French while the world was whirling in that great blender.

This I will pass on. There are a few churches here that have stained glass windows showing the American paratroopers.

There are cemeteries that contain a small number of the bodies of those who died in the invasion. This one, Colleville-sur-Mer, is located on a windy cliff overlooking the Ocean, the English Channel. The wind seems to always provide a loft for the flags that decorate this exquisitely dismal place. This land we are told, has been permanently ceded by France to the United States. It is American soil here in France. The crosses here tell of teen-agers who never came back home again, of young women who eventually married someone else, and of parents who were cheated out of children and grandchildren. If a cross were added for every life that was changed forever here, those crosses would reach all the way to heaven.

I looked at the crosses for a time, then I started seeing swastikas in the patterns they made with each other. I didn't like that. But I remembered that the swastika is also an ancient symbol some three to four thousand years old and found in the traditions of many native peoples, like the Hindu, Buddhists, American Navajo for example. It was the great symbol for the wind, fitting in with others that represented the sun, the moon, the stars, and life itself – the swastika was the symbol for the wind, the passage of time, and the changing of consciousness.