“Calhoun!” The colonel barked.

“Sir!” I replied.

“You did some good work today! I got a report from the captain. Said you showed some balls during the barn assault! So, now you’re a corporal!”

“Ahhh, yes sir, thank you, sir.”

“O.K., now, I gotta a detail for you.” “Uh oh, here it comes,” I thought. He said, “We’re all dragging our asses, none of us has had any solid food or water for over twelve hours and nothing is gonna catch up with us for at least two days. I want you to take a squad down to the beach and scavenge as many K-rations and full canteens off the guys there as you can carry and get ’em back up here so we can distribute them among the men. The way I see it, they died trying to accomplish the mission that we’re gonna complete and I don’t think they’d begrudge us their chow.”

It took me a few seconds to process what he said. I must’ve kind of blinked a couple of times, stammered, or something.

The colonel picked up on it and said softly, “It’s what we need to do now, Calhoun.”

I got a hold of myself and said, “Yes sir!”

I rounded up four guys I knew and we set off for the beach. It was getting late in the day, so I knew we had to get moving. We reached the beach in a few minutes and looked around. Graves Registration and the medical people were clearing the beach of bodies, but there were still plenty left. I sent two guys east along the beach and the other two and I headed west. We used empty musette bags and began to fill them with K-rations. We unbuckled their cartridge belts that held their canteens, rebuckled them and slung them over our shoulders.

A feeling of revulsion washed over me like a tsunami! I hadn’t been up close to any of the dead for more than a couple of seconds on the beach earlier in the day, but here I was, feeling like a grave robber, pawing through these guys’ gear to get their canteens and K-rations. Fucking K-rations! Jesus Christ! We all hated them anyway and I’m robbing their bodies of lousy K-rations! I can’t even describe the shame I felt. I couldn’t help myself, the emotions just poured out. I found myself apologizing to them as I “robbed” them! “I’m sorry, man,” “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry they got you,” “I’m sorry, I gotta do this,” “I’ll get the sons-a-bitches for you, man,” “I’ll make the bastards pay, I swear.” The other guys with me were weeping quietly as they moved from body to body. We took their chow and water, leaving only tears in payment. They, being the heroes they were, didn’t object.

From Chapter 19, A Day In Normandy

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I stumble-ran a short distance when I saw our First Sergeant lying on his side in a patch of red sand. His chest was soaked in blood; his arm was extended, his index finger pointing toward the cliffs. Tough, experienced and fair, the kind of leader every army needs to succeed, he was showing us the way even in death. I remembered him back on the troopship telling us what to expect and how to handle it. I had told him I was glad to be going in with some veterans. He growled to me, “Kid, when the ramp goes down, you do one thing! One thing, you hear? You haul ass like it’s on fire and don’t stop for anything or anybody! You got that?” I’ll never forget him. I must’ve stopped there, because a lieutenant we picked up along the way yelled at me to “get your ass moving!”

Rounds whining around, wanging off hedgehogs, finding guys, drilling, punching, boring, tearing, ripping into them. Dead and wounded were packed together like cigars in a cigar box. I’m so scared I wet myself, stumbling forward, mewing with fear. “Hail Mary full of Grace”, “Hail Mary full of Grace”, “Hail Mary full of Grace”, “Hail Mary full of Grace!” A sergeant ran beside me, yelling for us to, “move out, mo. . .” he coughed as his face blossomed into a red spray. He fell forward onto the red sand. I fell over the body of someone, his intestines laid out next to him, blood all over. He was still alive, moaning, calling for a medic. The priest we met on the Javelin was kneeling beside him, giving him last rites. I yell to the priest, “Father, get out of there!” He ignores me. Maybe the cross on his helmet will be seen by the Germans and they won’t shoot him. A radioman was kneeling in red sand, a huge gaping wound in his forehead, blood all down his right side, hands covered in blood, fingering a rosary. Bodies all around, the beach was black with them; some trying to move forward, most still.

From Chapter 14, A Day In Normandy

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Someone must have thought I had leadership potential, because I was put in charge of a crew detailed to pull “kitchen police” (K.P.) duty. “Kitchen police” has nothing to do with law enforcement. This is what is fondly referred to in the Army as a “shit detail” and was tough duty. It meant reporting to the mess hall at 03:30 or 04:00 and working usually ’til 20:00 or 21:00. How tough it was depended on the on-duty “mess” sergeant. Ours turned out to be a classic, garden-variety, 14k gold, card-carrying, textbook asshole. I guess he didn’t like the way I was parting what little hair I had, because he gave me the shittiest job in the U.S. Army: cleaning out the grease trap for the kitchen sinks. The grease trap is basically a metal box about two and a half feet long by one and a half feet wide and about two feet deep. It caught all the greasy drainage from the kitchen, which was considerable.

It is a dirty, stinking job and this prince of a sergeant told me to clean it out with my bare hands! I told him I wasn’t gonna do it without some sort of tool. He said, “I don’t have any tools, trainee!”

I couldn’t help myself; I popped off and said, “Well, sarge, in that case, I don’t have any hands. So, you better call the First Sergeant and have me escorted to the guardhouse.” He nearly shit green apples! I must’ve been the first trainee to stand up to the bastard. Red-faced, and barely able to contain himself…

From Chapter ll,  A Day In Normandy

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Omaha Beach itself was a defensive tactician’s dream. It was the largest of the beaches to be assaulted, about five miles long, enclosed by 100 – 170 ft. bluffs in a concave shape. It completely enveloping the beach and anchored at each end by 100 ft.  sheer cliffs. There was a gently sloping tidal area averaging about 300 yards between low and high tides, above which was a bank of shingle (small round stones). On the western half, a seawall about 4-12 ft. high, beyond which was about 200 yards of level sand and some marshy area, ended at the face of the bluffs. There were only five exits off the entire beach, with only one paved well enough to handle heavy vehicles. The others were basically narrow dirt roads barely 6 ft. wide. The Desert Fox had seen to it that they were heavily fortified.

The seawall was topped by two rows of barbed wire and the area between the shingle and the bluffs was practically paved with mines. A communications and trench system along the bluffs connected a series of 15 fortified strongpoints (Widerstandsnests, the number of which vary among sources) which triangulated every square foot of the beach with overlapping machine gun fire. There was no cover anywhere.

The GIs of the Big Red One and the 29ers didn’t know it, but they were going head-to-head with eight concrete bunkers with 75mm or larger caliber guns, 35 pillboxes stocked with artillery, 20-24 defensive flamethrowers, 18 anti-tank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launching sites, each with four 38mm rocket tubes and about 85 machine gun nests, all firing the dreaded MG-42 or MG-34 machine gun. The German gunners on the bluffs overlooked an amphitheatre. An amphitheatre of death.

From Prologue of A Day In Normandy.

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