Ordinary maneuvers - D-Day, 1944 - Column

Christian Century, June 1, 1994 by Martin E. Marty

The new york times Sunday crossword puzzle was called "Initial Occupations." How did various celebrities get their start? We learned that e. e. cummings was first an electrical engineer, P. T Barnum a physical therapist and J. D. Salinger a doctor of laws. For thousands in my generation the "initial occupation" would have been "soda jerk." It was for me.

Oh, I had shocked grain on the farm and dug dandelions and done other odd jobs. But in the summer of 1944 1 was 16, legally of age to earn and have earnings recorded. So I jerked sodas at Doering's Drug Store in Battle Creek, Nebraska, pop. 702. In the fast-food era are there still jerks and sodas? We were a slow-food emporium, catering to farmers who used their rationed gas gallons to come to town Saturday night. They shopped while the kids saw a "free show" under the stars, after which they all invaded Doerings for cholesterol-heavy homemade ice cream delights, ten cents each. Good old days. Norman Rockwell would have loved the scene.

While I was Jerking sodas on a slow day, June 6, 1944, the Doering radio told me that this was "D-Day." The draft loomed for my class; we came of age the year the war ended. Many young men from our town were in the service, and some were being remembered at the churches as missing, prisoners of war or killed in action. We were totally mobilized in support; Everyone knew D-Day was coming; it had to come.

D-Day. What a banal way, you might think, of addressing the themes of the greatest invasion operation in military history: by recalling such homey and homely things as soda jerking and free shows on Saturday night. But I mean to point to the contrast of worlds reported to and reported on then, as now. We live banal, ordinary, distanced, apparently plotless lives against the backdrop of dramatic, extraordinary, suddenly near and plotted maneuvers. Ask other civilians of my vintage and older what they were doing on D-Day and you will get banal and ordinary answers.

Contrast our home situations-we all kept eating ice cream that day with the faces pictured in magazines commemorating D-Day this year. See the look of fear on the visages of impatient troops. Their palms sweat, their pants are wet, their brows furrow; hey pray. They had to know that if not oneself, then the person one stood next to would almost certainly be blown up by an artillery shell - or possibly all would be gassed or bombed into nothingness. They had to know that, whatever they prayed for and however they prayed, being spared or killed was part of the terrible randomness of warfare. Two years before, many of them had jerked sodas. Now they were,cannon fodder or heroes to be, sometimes to be remembered on Memorial Day by later generations who interrupt the banality of the barbecue for a moment. Or who do not even pause.

One wonders how many thousand fell to friendly fire on D-Day and the day after. A president today knows that if he responds to editorialists who want troops in Bosnia or Haiti or Rwanda - no, no one asks for militancy there - and sends in the troops, he will be vilified. Every death of the dozen friendly fire casualties will be personalized; we will meet the parents on television, hear rage and scorn over each death, as we did not, could not have, during World War II.

I do not know whether it was "the last good war" or a "good war." its world was very different, and it is the difference between then and now that stands out most 50 years later.