In 1963, I was in the third grade. We moved from my hometown in North Carolina to Clarksville, Tennessee. We lived near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Fort Campbell is home of the “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne –-the Army’s only Air Assault Division. World War II was still in living memory all around us, and we had books and toys to reflect it—plastic toy soldiers, cap guns, and I think I remember having a toy mortar, of all things. We re-enacted D-Day and Iwo Jima, Wake Island, Pearl Harbor and El Alamein.

The 101st Airborne was famous: they were parachuted into France the night before the Normandy invasion to disrupt the German lines and routes of communication. They suffered heavy losses. They later were sent into Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. When we lived there, they trained the paratroopers. On Sundays, they would let the public come and watch paratroopers jump out of small planes. We would take relatives who visited to watch this. It was cheap entertainment.

I don’t know if it was always on view, and of course, memory is incredibly editorial. But I remember seeing one of Hitler’s walking canes that was recovered by American soldiers in May 1945 when troops from Fort Campbell helped capture Hitler’s home in Berchtesgaden. I looked it up. The stick had medallions representing the 13 European mountains that Hitler had supposedly climbed. I’ve read that they don’t show a lot of Nazi stuff now, although they have a lot in storage, including a gold goblet that belonged to Hermann Goering and a pair of earmuffs made from the mink bedspread of Eva Braun.

The war was in our lives because our parents and grandparents lived through it. My dad was too young, but four of his brothers served in the war. We knew that the world came close to disaster, and that terrible things happened. We heard about the concentration camps of Hitler, and unimaginable evil.

Hitler was synonymous with Satan for us. To this day, the sight of neo-Nazis makes me want to throw up. That is evil personified. No such thing as “neo-Nazis.” If you wear a swastika and like Hitler, you’re simply an ignorant fool. Because my memory was filled with images of brave young men who stormed the beach in France, many to never come home, to stop a fascist tyrant.

That memory is disappearing with those once-young boys, now in their nineties or older. Those white crosses of Normandy, though, still can cause a lump in the throat. They came home, if they made it, grateful to go to school. Have a family, get a job, join the local civic club and support their community. If they were people of faith they lived it, and if the guy next door was of a different persuasion, well, that was America. You had seen what hate could do.

It wasn’t a perfect world, and a lot of divisions and pain were yet to come. But they had one shining moment, too young to even understand, when they poured onto those bloody beaches, the fate of the Western World on those shoulders. And they stood the test. Will we?