D-Day Karma

It's the 63rd anniversary of D-Day.

With all of our WWII veterans dying off, it's more important than ever for us to remember the kinds of deeds they performed for us, in our names.

The Iraq War is immediate and on the news every night. It tends to put things like D-Day in better perspective because we're still sending soldiers into combat 63 years later. But, when you see people going about their daily lives, hardly mentioning it, I wonder how many people really care? If you asked some of the high school kids I see every day about D-Day they might conjure up Saving Private Ryan, but more than likely they'd give you a blank look. They look at World War II about the way I thought of the Civil War when I was in high school. It was a long ago event and nothing that happened then was important to me.

I thought that then, but now with age I see all of the wars which involve Americans as an ever-connecting link to the past. Lots of guys have died away from home in lonely, faraway places.

In 1970 a woman struck up a conversation with my friends and me about some things that now would be called New Age: mystical, hippie things that were common then, like astrology. At that time the Vietnam war looked like it would never end and we got onto that subject. I said I'd been lucky: at the height of the Vietnam war in 1967 I was sent to Germany to the peacetime Army. I wondered at my good fortune. She said, "Maybe it wasn't luck, maybe you are reincarnated from a soldier who died on a battlefield at one time, and your karma kept you away from this war."

It sounded funny at the time but it's interesting how what she said has stuck in my mind all these years. I'm not going to go all New Age on you and say I think it's true, but in it's way it made me think of the traditions of men marching off to war as has been done since the dawn of time, and since the founding of our country. It made me feel more connected to them, much more so than any lectures I got while in the Army about the history of wars we have fought.

Every so often that thought comes back to me. While watching Saving Private Ryan, still the best movie about war ever made, I thought, maybe I was one of those guys, coming off the landing craft, hitting the beach, getting the shit blown out of me by German artillery or machine guns. Then I had a mental note of whatever gods of karma there might be sitting around making notes on me in 1967, saying, "Hm. Postino has been drafted. He got killed last time around, so let's see he avoids it this time. Have the Army send him to Germany."

Hey, it could happen!

The cartoon above, from the book Up Front by Bill Mauldin, copyright 1945, is the image that future generations may always have of the Everyman American G.I.