I was an infant when Allied forces crossed the Channel and landed at Normandy in 1944 and none of my uncles were there. The only D-Day vet I knew was my high school biology teacher Lyle Bradley who dove into a foxhole under enemy fire and two men fell on top of him, both dead, who shielded him from a nearby mortar explosion. He never told me about it until he was an old man and so my first knowledge of it came from A. J. Liebling’s accounts in The New Yorker, which I read as a college kid and re-read last week on the anniversary. Reading them the first time made me want to be a writer and the re-reading was no less stunning.

Joe Liebling was a war correspondent aboard a 155ft landing craft that hit Omaha Beach at dawn and dropped off infantry and advance teams of engineers assigned to clear away mines and obstacles. He stood topside and reported what he saw and heard. He went to a chapel service, a chaplain quoting St. Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Printed copies of General Eisenhower’s message to the troops were passed out and men autographed them for each other as souvenirs. Liebling had boarded the boat days before and gotten to know the sailors who refer to the amphibious force as “the ambiguous farce” and the troops of the First Division who’ll go ashore; “The First Division is always beefing about something, which adds to its effectiveness as a fighting unit,” he writes. A trooper boards, saying, “Did you ever see a goddamn gangplank set in the right place?”