Hello, again! I am now home and back at work, which means this Secretary’s Corner is not prewritten.
First off, I want to say a huge thank you for allowing me to take off two months of time, plus the spontaneous two weeks I added to the end of my trip to spend in Greece. The entire experience was worth it, and I am so grateful I got to go!
Now, there are many stories I could bombard you with, and a couple thousand pictures I could spent hours scrolling through, so I will try to keep it short while still giving a snippet of what my life was like for the past two months.
What I have been thinking about specifically this week is Remembrance Day. While I was in France, I had the opportunity to visit a few battlegrounds from WWI and WWII. Two of these were Omaha Beach in Normandy and the Verdun trenches. I’ll attach four pictures of these two places at the end if I can.
Visiting these places was very sobering. It’s hard to believe that a place so green and full of life could be a place to bring so much death and destruction.
When we went to the memorial site at Omaha Beach for the 2,400 American soldiers that died on that very beach, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to feel. It is sometimes hard to know how much something will impact you. Well, let me tell you, if you want to feel something, walk through that memorial garden by the thousands of plain white crosses lined up, row after row, and start reading the names.
This is what I did (which maybe wouldn’t be advisable to a normal person, but I didn’t think anything of it until it was too late), and that hit really hard.
I can’t seem to find the words to explain how this felt.
As I walked through this place, I was reading off the names and realizing how many average, young, normal people were killed in this place. What was even worse was the scattered crosses engraved to an Unnamed Soldier. There wasn’t even a memorial left behind for those people.
Anyway. This really put into perspective how devastating these wars were, not just to “the Army” as a whole, but to the families connected to these thousands and thousands of cross memorials.
I don’t really know where to leave off here. That was kind of a downer. I suppose it is good to have “downers” sometimes to remind us of all that has been sacrificed to put us where we are today.
