“We Few, We Band of Brothers”

A wise personage once said that you should spend less money on things for your children and more money on experiences.

Ever since I read those words I’ve taken them to heart, and the advice has not let me down. Over and over again, when it was a matter of either buying my children presents or taking them somewhere, they always gleaned more joy and satisfaction from the trip. Every time, without fail. They can remember visits to fun places for years afterwards, even after I’ve forgotten all about them. A physical present, a toy that will break, loses luster in their eyes within days or weeks. But an experience, now that lasts forever.

But still, it was with some hesitation that I booked us all tickets for a special visit to the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA. My hesitation came from two sources. The first was that it was kind of expensive, what with how many children I have. But the second reason was the one that concerned me much more: I was worried that the memorial itself would have no impact on the children other than a huge place for them to run around and play. I worried, in other words, that this time an experience would finally be meaningless to them, and that I would spend a boatload of money on nothing.

If you have never been to or heard of the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, the story behind it bears some mentioning. June 6th, 1944 was of course a momentous day for all of America. The death toll of more than 4,000 men on the beaches of Normandy beggars the imagination. It was the price to be paid for kicking down Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, thus beginning the liberation of Europe from a hostile Germany. But for whatever reason, a proper memorial to the dead was never really built here in the United States. Not even Washington DC boasts such a memorial, surprisingly.

When the will to create a memorial to D-Day finally materialized, the people responsible for building it were searching for an appropriate location to put such a consequential place when they stumbled upon a remarkable and horrifying fact. The little town of Bedford, a pretty little Virginia hamlet and a haunt of my childhood, had sent its own boys to fight on D-Day. And within a day, 19 of those boys died on Normandy beach under German machine gun fire. For a community like Bedford of only 3,000 at the time, 19 deaths in one day was a staggering loss. Turns out that Bedford’s losses on D-Day were the highest per-capita losses of any town or city in the entire nation. There was no question, it was settled. The D-Day Memorial would be built in Bedford.

Which brings us to last Sunday, and our visit. Turns out that I needn’t have worried at all.

From the moment my children walked out onto the huge flower gardens at the base of the memorial, they were entranced. The younger ones of course had no idea where they were and delighted in running up and down the paths, but the older four realized I think without knowing it that they walked on hallowed ground. As we traversed up the memorial gradually approaching the wall of names, the statues of soldiers fighting and dying, the waterfall and faux beach, and finally the cliff surmounted by the Overlord arch, they soaked in the tragedy and triumph of it all. My oldest son was most deeply affected by it of all the children. I think he finally gained some inkling of what the world was like 75 years ago this year.

A world at war. A world war. One where young men (boys really) were thrown into a meat grinder that left none of them untouched, even the survivors.

When we finally all piled back into our van after the visit ended, every one of the children thanked me. No prompting, just a spontaneous outpouring of gratitude for what they’d seen and heard. I don’t believe they gained a huge amount of insight into the minutiae of D-Day, but that was never really the point. The enormity of the scene struck the right chord inside them all by itself, and they knew they were in a special place regardless of how young they are.

I am convinced they will remember this visit for a long time to come. No object could ever have affected them all so deeply. It was money well spent.