The other day we celebrated a key battle in a great conflict. No, I am not referring to Godzilla v. King Kong, although that might be fun to watch. And I am not thinking about the latest national political cage match, POTUS v. Musk.

No, last week we marked the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the massive Allied invasion of Normandy that was the beginning of the end of the Nazi occupation of Europe. This year, this annual milestone was skipped by most American national leaders, except for the SecDef, who began the day doing PT with Army Rangers on Omaha Beach where an estimated 2,400 Americans were slaughtered. Now, the SecDef is a young guy, just 45, so he and many others may know little of the events of that fateful day. But there was a witness, a reporter, a war correspondent named Ernie Pyle who arrived the next day and he painted a word picture for us all.

So, for the youngsters, those who believe collecting Social Security is a myth, I thought I would pluck a few of Pyle's words from a trio of columns he wrote after walking along that beach 81 years ago.

“It was a lovely dayfor strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead. Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units, it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now, our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp. Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half-hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly for the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours. For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.”

Pyle shared more details of that awful heroic event, telling us of rusty overturned tanks, personal items from bibles to cigarettes and even a tennis racket mixed in alongside the bodies in the sand and surf. And always he reminded us that thousands of American young men, boys really, paid the price of our freedom with their souls.

On Sunday, June 15, we will celebrate Father’s Day. It is a made-up holiday designed to provide equal time and commercial opportunity after Mother’s Day. But this year, our national leaders have turned Father’s Day into a strange made-up military parade day invented, supposedly, to honor the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army. We will see the tracks of mighty tanks and giant cannons tearing up the streets of the nation’s capitals and marching soldiers (who would probably rather be home with their families). Overhead there will be zooming jets and whirring choppers. The grand finale will be the Army’s parachute demonstration team flying out of the sky to present a flag to honor the smiling commander-in-chief.

They are honoring a guy who never served a day in uniform. He dodged the draft when his daddy found a friendly doctor to discover his son suffered from a mysterious case of bone spurs making him unable to serve.

Not all are called to serve. But we all can appreciate those who did. Our national policy provides the ways and means to bind the wounds, physical and mental, vets suffered while defending our way of life. It seems fitting that while we cheer the daring parachuters and rumbling tanks, we might listen to those veterans who question the administration’s plan to gut the very agency that cares for them, the Veterans Administration.

And next year, for heaven’s sake, may our leaders pay attention to the sacrifice of Americans we lost on Omaha Beach with respect, not by profaning her sacred sands as a playground for a big shot to show off his ability to do jumping jacks.