Overlord and the old

Today is one of those special days that sixty years ago everyone paused to remember, thirty years ago fewer but many did, and today only the old and history buffs stop and honor. It's D-Day, of course, when with Operation Overlord the Allied forces launched the biggest one-day amphibious assault ever attempted. The attack was an amazing effort that seared itself into the minds of a generation. Many of those who survived would pay for their entire lives with the hard memories of what they endured.

A great and powerful feature and failure of the human brain is that we cannot really know, truly understand, some things without living through them. This is a good trait, because it saves most of us from the horrors some of us have endured, but it is also bad, because like so many of our cognitive limitations, it separates us one from the other. Fiction can help, as can documentaries and memoirs, but those of us who were not, for example, present in war cannot truly grasp the events that will forever mark those who were.

I don't pretend to have any real sense of it. I've never been in a war, and I hope I never will be.

Growing up in a neighborhood of almost entirely retirees, however, I did get to listen to many old men who went ashore in that massive Normandy landing. Few would talk for long about it, even to a boy who was truly interested. All would pause at times, sometimes for a minute or more, and though I could never know their thoughts it was clear that they were momentarily back in the darkness through which they had managed to live.

Which brings me to this: When the very old want to talk, we'd all do well to listen. They might not understand Twitter or FaceBook or even how to operate their DVD players, but they were there at times that matter to us and will continue to matter, and hearing what it was like on the ground is amazingly different and better than reading the overviews of history books. Their stories will vanish with them if we do not listen, and the loss will be ours.