June 6, 2025

So many of the young men who gave their lives on Omaha Beach this day in 1944 were farm boys who had never seen an ocean, who just short months before were hauling hay in their early morning chores. The hope is that even as they fell they saw again the special light over the fields, the look on the cows’ faces at milking, the great horizon of every new day that a farm offers, a moment of work but also of comfort. It was America advancing on its frontier, and they had been chosen to protect the founders’ intent. They did the job, bless them all.

We thank all who sacrificed on that beach, men of all walks of life, and on the beaches code-named Sword, Gold and Juno. American farm, rural and city boys, industrial lads and others from Great Britain, Canadians from the provinces and the brave from Australia, New Zealand, the French Resistance, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg and Czechoslovakia. May they all have reimagined their people, their land, their community in their final, utterly immeasurable giving for freedom, which today is either absent or in dire threat across the globe.