Coleville Cemetery and Omaha Beach

I was completely caught off guard by this experience. I was mostly going to Coleville and Omaha Beach because Warner wanted to go, but it was probably the highlight of the trip. Coleville is one of those things you need to experience. You can't capture it in a picture or convey it in words. It is something you have to feel. We first walked into the garden at Coleville that has a wall around it with all of the names of soldiers whose bodies haven't been found. You felt a little of the spirit there, but then you walked up the stairs and there were the white crosses and you were hit with the spirit hard. I started to cry and felt foolish, but then I looked around and realized everyone was trying not to cry. At that moment, the bells started to ring and there wasn't a dry eye anywhere. It is truly a sacred place. Next, our guide took us down to Omaha Beach. She told us to look back at the cliffs, imagine young 19 year old boys being let off in the water weighed down with gear and told to cross that beach and climb the cliffs. It was raining and Germans were shooting at them from the tops of the cliffs. The beach was litered with mines. And then, she said, remember that they did this for us. It was to free the French and not their own homeland. I will never forget this experience. Unless you see it, you cannot imagine how far that must have looked and how impossible it must have seemed to those boys. It is amazing that any of them made it.