Alistair Savides

June 6th, 1944. The English Channel is angry and half the men in the landing craft are seasick. Diesel fumes mix with saltwater and vomit while rifles are checked for the fifth or sixth time by hands that need something to do. Nobody talks much anymore because the jokes have all been told and the bravado has finally burned away somewhere behind the English coast. You are nineteen years old and carrying more weight than you’ve ever carried in your life. You don’t know it yet, but it’s the most weight you will EVER carry in this life. However long or short it may be. Your rifle rests across your knees. Your life hangs from a few pounds of steel, wood, and training. Somewhere beyond the gray horizon sits a continent that has spent five years tearing itself apart, and in a few minutes you are going to step into the middle of it. Across from you sits another kid. He can’t be much older than you. His jaw is clenched. His knuckles are white around his weapon. Neither of you says a word because there is nothing left to say. Then your eyes drift toward his shoulder. That red numeral catches your eye: “1”. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. In barracks hallways, on training fields, in motor pools, and on long marches. It never meant much beyond belonging to the same outfit. Now it means everything. Because in a few minutes the world is going to ask something terrible of both of you, and there is comfort in knowing that whatever waits on that beach, neither of you will face it alone. The historians will eventually reduce this day to arrows on maps and casualty figures. Politicians will give speeches. Journalists will write books. None of that exists inside the landing craft. What exists is fear, and duty. What exists is the understanding that courage was never the absence of fear. Courage was always charging into the maelstrom anyway. The shoreline emerges through the smoke. You can see flashes now. You can hear the distant percussion of artillery. Men stop checking their equipment because there is no point anymore. Whatever mistakes were made are already made. Whatever prayers were going to be said have already been said. The coxswain throttles down. The boat grinds forward. The ramp is about to drop. Into the abyss. Overlord.