Early on the morning of June 6, 1944, allied forces converged on the beaches of Normandy.
As they emerged from the English Channel, Nazi forces opened fire from higher ground. A bruising battle ensued.
Ultimately, the Allies prevailed. That victory helped turn the tide of World War II.
The Normandy invasion is known as D-Day. And when I was young, there were plenty of ceremonies honoring the veterans who risked everything to make it happen.
These tributes were noble. They were honorable. And I wanted no part of them.
Why would I?
After all, I was a kid living in peacetime modernity. I’d never been to the shores of France, or any shores other than those of my own country.
Plus, June 6th was at the start of summer. My mind was fixated on going to the beach, building a sandcastle, and letting the ocean waves cool me down.
I had no frame of reference for why D-Day was worth pausing my summer festivities for.
I was losing the thread — and fast.
On September 21, 2001, I walked up to a police checkpoint with my father.
I showed a police officer my school ID, while my father pulled his driver’s license out of his wallet.
The officer looked each document over carefully, before ushering us past the barricade.
We proceeded to walk a mile down eerily quiet streets before reaching Ground Zero.
Eleven days earlier, Ground Zero had been known as the World Trade Center in New York City. Twin skyscrapers that dominated the skyline.
Now, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, those towers were reduced to rubble. A mess of twisted steel, ash, and debris lay in the area, measuring roughly 60 feet high.
My father and I were required to stay a block away from the rubble. Recovery efforts were still ongoing, and civilians weren’t to be part of that initiative.
Even still, the sight of that twisted steel was jarring enough to haunt me forever. As was the coating of dust on a scaffold support my father touched. It was inches thick.
That scene reinforced just how much my life had changed. I’d been adjacent to the horrors of September 11th as they occurred – close enough to sense my own demise. Yet, I was still 7 miles from the towers, relying on hearsay and TV news for information of what had transpired.
Now, it was all too real. An area that had seemed familiar weeks earlier now looked like a foreign war zone.
It didn’t matter what hoops I’d need to jump through to enter a building or board an airplane moving forward. I’d happily run through the security ringer to avoid seeing something like this ever again.
I was never losing this thread.
It’s been a generation since the September 11th attacks. And it’s been five generations since D-Day.
And with that passage of time has come a sense of detachment.
Many young adults fail to take security at buildings or transportation venues as seriously as I do. They view it all as a wasteful hassle. An unneeded expense for an imaginary threat that may never transpire.
This viewpoint alone is troublesome. But the dissonance goes deeper than that.
Some have taken it upon themselves to attempt assassinations of prominent figures, to openly support enemies of our nation, or even to espouse Nazi ideologies. Indeed, extremism has emerged from the shadows on all sides of the ideological spectrum, with devastating consequences.
Many pundits have blamed our polarized society for these developments. Others have pointed to the whiplash of a pandemic, racial reckoning, and inflationary crisis in quick succession.
Those might be accelerants, much like gasoline on a blaze. But they’re hardly the initial spark.
No.
Losing the thread is what’s to blame. Plain and simple.
When we get too far from the nightmares of yesterday, we find it all too easy ignore their lessons. We wander aimlessly past the washed-out guardrails of decency and common sense. And we revisit the darker corners of our humanity.
The world becomes a more chaotic and confrontational place. The door is open to danger. And then next nightmare is suddenly upon us.
It’s a tragic inevitability. Or is it?
There’s a picture on my wall at home. It’s in black and white, and it features 124 corpsmen of the United States Navy.
There in the front row, two to the left of the flagbearer, is my grandfather.
The photo is postmarked March 8, 1945. U.S. Naval Training Center. Great Lakes, Illinois. It was two weeks after my grandfather’s 18th birthday.
History books would later note that World War II was in its final stages at this time. But as my fresh-faced grandfather wrapped up basic training, he didn’t know that. No one did.
It would be nearly two more months until Adolf Hitler killed himself in a bunker near Berlin. Another three months would pass before Hiroshima was obliterated by an atomic bomb.
As my grandfather shipped off to a base in California, he was preparing to put his life on the line.
That never transpired.
A foot injury in the barracks kept my grandfather from seeing combat. And the subsequent surrender of the Axis powers led my grandfather to complete his military service in the earliest days of postwar peace.
And yet, years later, my grandfather was unequivocal about why he joined the Navy. And he made clear to me that he’d have made the same decision 10 times out of 10.
My grandfather pointed out that he loved America and hated Fascism. The last thing he wanted to see was a Mussolini or Hitler reigning over our shores.
The horrors of the Holocaust – made evident to much of America after Hitler’s death – only strengthened my grandfather’s resolve. As a first generation American, he found ethnic cleansing to be particularly abhorrent.
I took in this wisdom wholeheartedly. And because of it, I started to pay D-Day a bit more mind.
I read up on the invasion. I white-knuckled through the opening scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan. And I started acknowledging the tributes to the aging veterans in my midst.
The cost of forgetting had been made clear to me. And I wasn’t about to pay that toll.
Deep down, I think that’s what drives me to keep remembering the aftermath of September 11th.
Yes, the trauma of that attack still impacts me – and it probably always will. But as time goes on, and many born after that fateful day grow up, the power of Never Forget fades. And the risks of reprisal accelerate.
My mission is to help prevent that. To keep us from losing the thread even more than we already have.
But it takes more than my best effort.
It’s on all of us who have been through tribulations to share our stories. To keep those bright stars of tomorrow from backsliding into the failings of yesterday.
This process is inconvenient, even painful. But it’s necessary.
For without the thread of history, our society is destined to wind up lost.
Let’s get back on the map again.