Waves of sadness wash over me on Omaha Beach

by Yeoh Siew Hoon/Transit Cafe

Late last year, I strolled on the beaches of Normandy in the surprisingly warm autumn sun and visited the American cemetery at Omaha Beach.

Looking at the desolate and bleak Omaha beach, one of the bloodiest landings of the war, and walking among the more than 9,000 graves of soldiers, I wondered what it must have been like for the first wave of men and boys who landed on the beach.

Try as hard as I could, I found it difficult to really imagine the brutality and horror that must have befallen them.

The beach looked like it could belong in a tourist brochure, the grass I walked on was green and lush, the graves were marked by pristine white crosses or stars and gracing the entrance of the cemetery is a beautiful, graceful statue of a man with the words, “This embattled portal of freedom is forever hallowed by the ideals of valour and the sacrifices of our fellow countrymen.”

A powerful image and “as few words as possible” – that’s all there is left to remind us of the carnage and horror that must have unfolded from the day of the first landing on June 6, 1944 to the liberation of Paris on August 25.

A week later, I watched the Clint Eastwood movie “Flags of Our Fathers” which tells the story behind the defining image of World War Two – the photo of six marines planting up the flag at Iwo Jima on February 1945.

A powerful image and “as few words as possible” – that too was the message of the movie. Never mind the reality surrounding the photo, all that mattered was the image and what it portrayed. The photo turned the six marines into heroes and the three survivors were shipped back to star in a fund-raising tour.

The movie captures the brutality of the Iwo Jima invasion – “the most loss of life of any Marine campaign”, according to Clint Eastwood in a CBS interview – and the dirty politics that went behind the government campaign to raise funds.

Never mind that it was the second flag – the first flag had to be brought down because an officer wanted it as a souvenir – the facts behind the flag-raising were dismissed by a ruthless and relentless public relations machine that simply wanted things “neat and clean”.

You see, that’s what we all want and that’s what we are fed by our institutions – things that are “neat and clean”. We don’t really want to know the whole sordid truth about life and especially death; we only want simple images and slogans.

I think, for most of us fortunate enough not to have been through a war, such horrors are really beyond our comprehension.

We “experience” it “live” by reading the newspapers or watching television and then we “relive” it through movies such as “Flags of Our Fathers” or “Saving Private Ryan”.

For those of us who are so inclined, we also visit war sites. I have cried my way through Dachau, felt my stomach turn inside Toul Sleng in Phnom Penh and I have crawled my way through the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam in the days before they were widened to accommodate tourist bodies.

The American cemetery at Omaha Beach felt tranquil, yet I couldn’t help but be enveloped by an overwhelming sense of sadness for the loss of life.

And my mind wandered helplessly to Iraq. Remember that defining television image of joyful Iraqis toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein and how, in as few words as possible, we were led to believe the Americans had won?

Look where we are now.

You can join Yeoh Siew Hoon at her favourite hangout – The Transit Café – www.thetransitcafe.com