The Longest Day
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Courageous and unwilling to compromise with evil.
Truly the Greatest Generation!
God bless them and pray we discover the courage and fortitude to live life worthy of their sacrifice.
Without them most of us would not be here today and those who are here would be in a very different world.
So many of our nation’s young people could not tell you what D-Day is (was).
What a shame.
Great post.
Thank you.
Charlie S. Burk, a 95 year old healthy D-Day veteran, who is childless and a widower since1980, and lives alone in a house he bought new in 1972, told me Friday while we were having lunch at McDonald’s and he was enjoying one of his favorites – Friday cod fish sandwich special ($1.59) and milk – about what the Germans put into the water, and what it looked like, to prevent or interrupt any attempt to land there. He also commented on the reality of the movie The Longest Day. This movie “news-reel” (which was shown in movie theaters before the invention of television) and video of the West Point Cadets Choir singing The Longest Day, brought to life what he described to me. As I looked around and saw young adults going about their normal activity in a restaurant, the thought occurred to me that they haven’t got a clue of what Charlie and the rest of those guys did that day so they, these kids, could be doing what they were doing today, and living the lives they got.
Charlie was the 6th child (18 months old) out of 7 children who were orphaned when their father committed their mother to a mental hospital and then abandoned them. All of his brothers and sisters, but the oldest who got adopted, were raised in a Catholic orphanage outside Chicago, Ill. He left when he was 16 years old and has been on his own ever since.