Friday Fictioneers. One hundred words to tell a story, a snippet of life told tightly. Does it succeed? You let me know.
Copyright E. A. Wicklund
Remembrance
Standing there, he can only imagine (because Dad had rarely spoken of it), dropping into the Higgins boats, men crying, boys stiff with fear; your best friend dying next to you in the ocean red with blood, men drowning as their water-filled helmets trapped them under waves. After staggering the long yards through waist-deep ocean, the vast expanse of Omaha Beach still waiting, filled with mines and hedgehogs and openness, the deadly rain of ammunition falling all around. Behind, the inexorably rising tide; ahead, the unknowable.
The gulls’ hoarse cries echo the forgotten screams of the defiant and the dying.
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A snippet of what my father-in-law and so many others experienced on this and other beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Higgins boats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCVP_%28United_States%29
Hedgehogs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_hedgehog
My father-in-law’s ship:
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