Omaha Beach

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France -- On the bluffs above Omaha Beach, 10 buses unloaded veterans of the 29th Infantry Division. They were walking reverently through the American Cemetery, and they were crying.Ben Mirmelstein, a retired insurance-company vice president from Dallas, trembled slightly as he reached Plot J, Row 19, No. 15 and gazed down at the lush grass above Leonard D. Kerperien, a gunner in his machine-gun squad."That's why I came here," he said later. "Not for the ceremonies but to honor my buddies.

Maryland's portion of U.S. 29 was renamed the "29th Infantry Division Memorial Highway" yesterday, honoring the only National Guard soldiers to participate in the D-Day invasion."

On the afternoon of July 11, 1944 - 35 days after the Allied invasion at Normandy - Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower came across a forgotten note tucked inside his wallet. He called in his naval aide, Capt. Harry C. Butcher, who, taking the paper, read: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

SOMETIME THIS morning, Walt Wintsch will head over to the green, rolling grounds of Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium for the annual Memorial Day ceremony. You won't find him up front with all the politicians and big shots and the war heroes with the pins in their caps, their chests sagging with gleaming medals and ribbons. Wintsch, 76, will be somewhere in the back of the crowd, alone with his thoughts, and maybe with a few tears, too. This is the day we honor the men and women of our armed services who gave their lives defending this country.

The evening before the ceremony, Edwin Wolf couldn't sleep.Memories he preferred to ignore stirred all night: guiding a boat into the flash of gunfire, gray waves tossing drowned boys, German mines sticking up in the sand, the sting of sulfur on his face.The ghostly trace of voices, smells, panic of June 6, 1944, returned.At 92, Lt. Col. Edwin J. Wolf again raced down Omaha Beach -- and found himself awake in his Roland Park home, a retired lawyer, not a soldier. He felt sick, shaken.A recent letter from the Army said it had misplaced the paperwork for the medal he should have received 55 years ago. Yesterday, at a small ceremony at Fort Meade, the Army finally awarded him the Bronze Star for valor.

Richard "Herk" Herklotz remembers the barrage balloons thick over the vast D-Day fleet and the bodies thick in the water as his landing craft sped toward Omaha Beach."

Pistol in hand, 70 pounds of gear on his back, eyes wide open, the Army private from Baltimore never lost his focus. Hard to believe, given all he'd lived through in the previous few hours, but Charles "Harry" Heinlein kept moving inland on June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach had been chaos -- botched boat landings, piles of corpses, the ground-shaking roar of guns -- but he made it across and up the bluff through Les Moulins Draw. At the top, he had seen his good friend, Joe Walentowski, take shrapnel in the leg but had had to leave him, struggling, behind.

When veterans of the Maryland-Virginia 29th Division stand on Normandy's Omaha Beach in a few weeks remembering their landing there on June 6, 1944, D-day, a tangible piece of the division legend may be on hand -- their commanding general's jeep.From Omaha Beach to the link-up with the Russian Army at the Elbe River in 1945, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, the 29th's Pattonesque commander, traveled in the jeep, which he called "Vixen Tor" for a hill near the division's training area at Tavistock in southwestern England.

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France - The old man looked to the sea and recalled his youth, when he clambered out of a boat and slipped into water that came up to his neck and struggled through the tide to Utah Beach on D-Day. He searched the sky, slate-gray and laced with rain, and remembered how he and his men moved inland, behind cattle, to make sure mines were cleared. And finally, George Memoly looked across the vast green lawn with its sorrowful rows of white marble headstones, Latin crosses and stars of David, and reflected on a generation's war and a nation's loss.

Most of the men who first hit Omaha Beach died. They probably knew they would die, and they went anyway. I guess they didn't have any choice. They were scared, but still they came. They stormed the beach and they died. And more kept coming. And more died.And the dying was ugly and horrible and cruel, as it always is in war.But the dying was for a reason, for a cause, even a noble cause. And, in the end, the men who hit the beach prevailed, and the world was forever changed.The changing-of-the-world part is what makes the Normandy invasion important.