SAN DIEGO _ They're invading Normandy again, 75 years after D-Day. So much has changed. One thing hasn't.
It's always been about their buddies.
When they parachuted in the dark out of airplanes or splashed into the surf down the ramps of landing craft, they were fighting for liberty, democracy and an end to Nazi tyranny. But those became abstract notions when the bullets started flying and the shells fell. In the terror of combat, they fought for each other.
Died for each other, too, and that's what sends the survivors back to France, all these years later, in their wheelchairs and their walkers. To pay their respects to the ones who never came home. To shed tears among row after row of white crosses in the cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer.
"They're the real heroes," said Clair Martin.
The Pacific Beach resident and former Army radio operator is 98, and one of an ever-dwindling number of D-Day survivors. No one knows how many are left among the more than 73,000 Americans who crossed the English Channel on June 6, 1944, for Operation Overlord, the largest air, sea, and land invasion in military history. Organizers of Thursday's official 75th anniversary ceremony in Normandy are expecting maybe 30 U.S. survivors.
Martin and a handful of other San Diego County vets will be among them, or at associated events over the next week. Thousands of spectators are expected to swarm the region, cheering the survivors wherever they go with standing ovations and free drinks in bars. They will be saluted in speeches by world leaders. People will ask them to autograph T-shirts and hats. They'll pose for countless photos, tell their stories over and over.
Tom Rice, a retired teacher from Coronado, will be featured in much of the media coverage because, at age 97, the former Army paratrooper is scheduled to jump out of an airplane, re-enacting what he did in the early hours of D-Day, wearing the same boots but this time harnessed to another much younger parachutist.
He has been doing tandem jumps on D-Day for several years now, all of them to honor those killed in the war. The way he sees it, when he came home, he got the chance to spend more than 40 years teaching history and coaching track at Chula Vista and Hilltop high schools. He got to marry and have children. They didn't.
"I don't want anybody to forget them," he said.
When Jack Port goes back to Normandy, it's as something of a symbol to the French, a living representation of the Army grunts who slogged their way up the beach, fought in the hedgerows, and gave France back its freedom. Touched by the gratitude he felt when he returned for 25th anniversary D-Day events in 1969, he's made the trip again and again _ more than 30 times now _ and nourished friendships.
The 97-year-old Oceanside resident has been made an honorary citizen of three Normandy towns. Last year, a school in Saint-Pois was named after him.
This year brought another unexpected tribute: He was asked to go to Portsmouth, England, to be part of a June 5 ceremony hosted by the Queen in the area where allied troops massed to cross the channel on D-Day.
Port said he was honored, but he turned down the invitation. He was worried about getting back to Normandy in time and being rested enough to participate as a speaker in the next day's commemoration on Utah Beach, where he splashed ashore 75 years ago amid the carnage of machined-gun bodies and shell-blackened landing craft.
"On D-Day, Utah Beach is where I want to be," he said. "That's where I need to be."
