I was 15 years old on the original D-day, and like Pearl Harbor, and 9/11/2001, it made an indelible mark on my soul, like the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation made indelible marks on our souls. This morning I spent two hours watching the Presidents of the U.S.A. and France commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the biggest land, sea, and air battle in the history of the world. As their background, they had the remaining members of the veterans of the Normandy Invasion, most of them 100 years old. And the background of the veterans were the ten thousand crosses of the dead buried there.
I write about entering eternity with ease, but those 10,000 young Americans did not go into eternity with ease, but they did it with courage, love, fear, trepidation, terror, horror, and final resignation, because they had to. Among those buried in Normandy is my Uncle Johnny Castriano, who was killed by a direct hit from a German tank in Southern France in November 1944. Johnny had volunteered right after Pearl Harbor and went to North Africa, then fought through Sicily and southern Italy, and was wounded in the Invasion of Anzio, in February 1944. He was wounded for the second time and received his second Purple Heart, and wrote to my mother that he would finally be coming home after three years of fighting where he was only one of a handful of survivors in his original company. Before the letter ever arrived in Boston, Uncle Johnny recovered from his wounds, and was sent to Southern France to open up another front against the Germans. All the Americans who died in France were buried at Normandy.
As I said above, there is something different, indelible, about World War II and also the Korean War, that is not true for the rest of the wars we have been engaged in since. It was not because we were “The Greatest Generation”. I am part of that generation, and “we” if you will pardon my presumption, did what we had to do, because it was right. We saw the truth that was plain to see. There were brothers and sisters in Europe, in the Pacific, and Korea, who were begging us to help them. England and France had been our allies for several generations. The Pacific nations that had been aggressively dominated by the Japanese, and the South Koreans who were being bullied by Communist idealogues, were begging for our help. It was not the same with Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. We did not have to send our youth to die there. And the results speak for themselves.
The real casualty in our time is truth. We are not seeing the truth in ourselves, in our neighbors, in other nations, in the rest of the world. We cannot see the difference between humanism and nationalism. What we are doing to the ecology of our planet is the best example of how selfishness is blinding us from the truth. We all have to pause and see what we are doing to our planet. We have to see what we are doing to our own bodies, before we can see the truth of what we are doing to our planet. We have to see the truth of our own individual lives, and the lives of all the beings on the planet in the light of eternity. Entering Eternity With Ease—-Indeed.
Sal Umana 