D-Day Everyone has one!
Watching a show on D-Day 6th of June 1944 (SBS television) the sheer volume
of death and destruction and the mammoth size of the undertaking still
overwhelms me every time I think of it.
D-Day
by statistics.
1. 4,000 ships in the fleet
2. 5,800 bomber planes
3. 4,900 fighter planes
4. 153,000 troops
5. 20,000 vehicles
6. 11,000 casualties
7. 2,500 dead
8. 2,052,299 men came ashore following D-Day
9. 3,098,259 tons of stores
10. 640,000 Germans are killed, wounded or taken
prisoner in the Battle of Normandy and nearly three hundred thousand allies are
killed or wounded.
The show has all the graphic images of the day
ships, planes, tanks, parachutes, guns, etc. But the thing that really got me
was the way the men involved both Allied and
German interviewed years later were talking. It swept backwards and forwards to the young men going on the day and then
back to the old soldiers years later.
You could still make out the men who they were , the eyes were still lively the memories
vivid. They would often stumble, be emotional and cry as they remembered. This
was especially so as they thought about killed mates and the awful carnage of the day.
A lot of them reflected on how lucky they were not
to die, or how close they had come to death. It was almost as if they were
surprised to have survived. They were humble and strong at the same time as
they dwelt on this. They had a character about them you do not often see;
maybe it was because they had seen deaths face and lived to tell the tale.
It got me thinking that we have to take every day
as a gift, so many of them young fellas did not get another day. But they did
what young fellas do, act with bravado, brush it off, be gun ho.
We live our days as if we are never going to die,
as though we have endless days, we are reckless and unthinking with our time.
Time is the only thing we really own, but we spend it like we have an
inexhaustible supply.
If you think about it, every day we face our
D-Day. Every day is a potential last day but we are not like those fellas in
1944, we do not prepare, train, or ready ourselves for it. We are like two bob millionaires
spending capital we do not have.
Someone once told me:
‘This is how to treat your friends,
Greet them like your dog greets you, and
Say goodbye to them like you will
never see them again.’
I
would add something to these great and wise words:
Treat every day the same as you would
treat a good friend.
In
other words; Greet it with joy and
live it like you will never see another.
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