Day 5 Revisited: Remembering Pont du Hoc

This from Josiah, who had additional impressions to share from Pont du Hoc.

There is a bend in the path ahead. Our motley group of eleven winds its way through the landscaped hedgerows in silence. Not a word is spoken, not because we have been forbidden to do so, but because the very solemnity of the site demands awed respect. Yet the full potency of Pont du Hoc’s power has not yet hit. For that bend—that bend in the path—holds secrets which are unintelligible to all, save for those who have seen and learned from Pont du Hoc’s broken plain.

When our group walked around a simple, commonplace bend in the path leading to Pont du Hoc in Normandie on Friday morning, we were there. We were there when the young men, who had only known their safe farms and cities back home, climbed past machine gun bullets on a sheer rock face to free a people whom they did not know. We were there when young German soldiers, doing their job as warriors for the Third Reich, which many naively knew very little about, shot out of bunkers to hordes of Americans and British troops landing on shore. We were there when a devastating artillery shell hit its target, delivering its deadly payload with accuracy. And yes, as we walked through the American cemetery in Normandie, we were there when the parents and the wife received a letter in the mail, informing them of a new hero made. For the countryside that I scanned, just around the bend, when I stopped dead in my tracks that day, told me the secrets which I cannot relay.

The scenes I have just depicted, in describing where we were, are the titles of the secrets of Pont du Hoc. They are not easily explained by those who know them, much less understood by those who do not. Our motley group of eleven wound its way through the landscaped hedgerows in silence, and found what lay beyond the bend.

May our lives be forever different by God’s grace.

Advertisement