Maybe Mink could have collected the words and put them down, but even with Mink I wasn’t sure. For me, my memories are already changing what I saw and what I’ve done. The visions are already getting softer, less hard-edged. Scenes I thought I would never forget are beginning to fade and fold into other scenes, are becoming less violent, and I know that I don’t want to sort them out, I don’t want to relive them, and, yes, I don’t want to find the right words to make them real again. What I need is for the running across the beach, the calling out for God, the fear, the pain, and, most of all, the killing to become somehow bearable. Somehow bearable.
If any of the dead returned — Major Howie, Stagg, the bodies bobbing in the water — perhaps they could be clearer, or would want to be. Or perhaps if the German soldier, naked and beyond his senses, could have translated for us the voices he heard when he was calling out “Don’t say that!” over and over again, maybe if we could have all heard what he didn’t want us to say, it would have been meaningful.
After I was wounded, some of the guys found the impromptu aid station where they had taken me and I had promised them I would write. I haven’t. I’ve promised myself I would write to Marcus or, barring that, would sit down with him when I got home — if he also made it back — and have a beer. Now, I’m not sure.
If I connect with Vernelle, I’ll give her a version of what I have been through. Mom will get another version, and then I’ll probably just keep my mouth shut and the beasts I have seen shut away.
The girl comes back and announces that she’s from a news service.
“We reach over sixty papers in the States,” she says. “Could you tell me, and all America, what you are feeling now that you have seen General Eisenhower commend the troops you fought with?”
“I’m proud of the 29th, and of all the men I served with,” I say. “They’re a great bunch of guys.”
“I thank you, sir,” she says. “I thank you, and the country thanks you.”
She pats the leg in the sling and leaves.
It wasn’t easy talking to the veterans of World War II, or reading their letters, or probing their feelings. I talked to most of them multiple times, and they gave me as much information as they could remember, often becoming quite emotional as they talked about the June 1944 invasion of Europe. Some of them wept as they spoke. I thought I knew how they felt.
My first book about war dealt with the death of my brother in Vietnam. His death was the kind of shock that no one is ever fully prepared for. I started writing a short story about what I was doing the moment that Sonny was killed. It helped some, but then I wrote another story, which I published in Essence magazine. Finally, I approached the Vietnam story in the form of a novel, Fallen Angels. It was the hardest book I had ever written. I didn’t think that I would ever write another book about war.
Then my oldest son, a military chaplain, called to say that he was going with his unit to the Middle East. The research for Sunrise over Fallujah was a kind of preparation for the bad news, which, fortunately, never came. Michael Dean Myers survived, but both he and I were changed by what was known as the Gulf War; he by what he saw and experienced, and I by the realization that no amount of clever talk, no amount of high-level policy meetings, would ever do away with man’s capacity for self-destruction.
I took Robin Perry — the nephew of Richard Perry, a character in Fallen Angels — and put him in the center of Sunrise. Yes, Vietnam was different than Iraq, the weapons and terrain were dissimilar, but I needed to show that they shared the same brutal ideas, the same need for young people to come to grips with who they are and to face the fundamental need for survival while doing their duty. In Sunrise the relationship between Robin Perry as he serves in Iraq and his father and uncle back home has a kind of tension that comes with the fear of having a loved one in combat. As long as my son was in the combat area I feared for his safety. Every phone call in the middle of the night filled me with alarm. This is the nature of war.
World War II ended with the unconditional surrender of the Germans and the devastating bombing of Japan. I remember thinking that there would probably be no more wars after the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But wars are started by people, not weapons. In Invasion I created a character, Marcus Perry, who was the father and uncle to those who served in subsequent wars. He is serving in a segregated army and does not fight with Josiah “Woody” Wedgewood, a young man from his hometown of Bedford, Virginia. The two friends carry the traditions of their own country into a worldwide conflict as both risk their lives fighting against the Nazis.
The basic truth about war is that it is unbelievably brutal and I want my readers to understand this. When we sift through the images to find one suitable to publish, as we put background scenes and sounds to men running across open fields, we tend to put away those pictures we don’t want to see. If we’re lucky we can put a face on war that reveals its horrors, but in a way that doesn’t repulse the reader. It’s not an easy task because we know too much about what happens on the battlefields.
We know that the bombs we drop on cities will kill civilians as well as soldiers. We know that children, even babies, will die. We know that some of our friends will not return. We know that many who do return will be strangers to us.
When General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent American soldiers off to storm Omaha Beach he knew that many of the over fifty thousand American troops, perhaps up to 70 percent of the first wave, would be either killed or wounded. How can we even think of that many young lives lost? And yet Eisenhower had to make that decision.
“We saw our boys dying on the beach,” ex–Navy officer Henry B. McFarland told me. “And we knew we had to get our ships in as close to the beach as possible — the bottoms were scraping sand — to fire back at the German guns.”
The Germans were expecting the attack, and their general Erwin Rommel knew how important the beach landings would be. Everyone knew about the dying that would happen that day. By June 1944 it was clear that Germany was losing the war, but there were madmen who insisted the carnage continue. Hitler called upon old men and young boys to sacrifice their lives for his lost cause.
“I was fifteen,” a former German soldier told me. “I was scared to go into the war, but I was just as scared to say that I wouldn’t.”
I asked John Cingerre, who had been among the first waves onto Omaha, how tired he had been at the end of what has become known as the Longest Day. “I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was just looking all around me, at all the dead bodies and all the wounded men, and wondered if I would make it out alive.”
I asked William H. Edwards about his experiences as a truck driver, bringing supplies to the front lines under heavy fire. “The Germans knew that the ammunition and equipment we were bringing from the beach to the front was crucial, and they sent out sniper teams to kill the drivers,” he said. “I was driving in a convoy at night, inches from the truck in front of me, and trying to steer from the center seat. It was some scary times.”
The men stood up under the pressure of having to fight across the hedgerows of Normandy. They quickly understood what the costs would be in human suffering and losses and were willing to make the sacrifices. But there was a sense of loss that stayed with them forever. Corporal Albert C. Wehmeyer wrote to a young woman that his brother had met briefly, and had shared his brother’s feelings about their possible future together. The brother had been killed in Normandy.
“I am trying to find out where he is buried, but as yet I haven’t been able to but hope to soon…. I was very lucky to get to see him about three weeks before it happened. I shall never forget those last twenty minutes we spent together.”
Ironically, it was the young people of the Second World War era who made the decisions to fight in Vietnam. And it was the young people of the Vietnam War era who made many of the decisions to fight in the Middle East. Will there ever be an end to war? Perhaps. Perhaps if we don’t make the killing attract
ive, if we give accurate pictures of the horrors involved, if we can get our young men and women to look for other ways of settling disputes, it might end.
I received brilliant support in my reserach for this book, among which were interviews granted by Henry B. McFarland, who, on June 6, 1944, was a young Naval officer supporting the initial assault on Omaha Beach. He also supplied me with the invasion maps. John Cingerre was an enlisted man struggling to get a foothold on the beach and described, in detail, the dreadful scenes of bravery and horror, as well as the difficult days that followed. The only frontline African American soldiers landing on June 6 were those involved in setting up the barrage balloons that protected the ground troops from enemy aircraft. William H. Edwards, in a largely African American Transportation Battalion, arrived on June 7 and, with great emotion, told me of his part in the war as a member of the famed Red Ball Express — the truck convoys that supplied the American Army as it tried to break a determined German Resistance.
The photograph that is used in the background of this book’s cover is one I supplied from my personal collection. For inclusion on the cover, its background has been slightly cropped. The photo was taken on June 7, 1944. In the original photo, there are long lines of men who have been off-loaded onto Omaha Beach, and the offshore Naval vessels have moved in closer to shore. On June 7, transportation units, stevedores, Graves Registration, and other support units were all coming ashore. This is why I chose to put Perry in a transportation unit. The African American soldier I interviewed, William H. Edwards, landed (along with his assistant driver) on this day.
The Army was officially integrated in 1948, but black soldiers were brought from the Pacific campaign on a volunteer basis and put into white units in 1945. This was done without fanfare because of the need for warm bodies.
WALTER DEAN MYERS is the 2012–2013 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He is the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of nearly one hundred books for children and young adults. His award-winning body of work includes Somewhere in the Darkness, Slam!, and Monster. Mr. Myers has received two Newbery Honor medals, five Coretta Scott King Author Awards, and three National Book Award Finalist citations. In addition, he is the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Copyright © 2013 by Walter Dean Myers
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
First edition, October 2013
Cover illustration © 2013 by Tim O’Brien
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-57659-8
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Walter Dean Myers, Invasion
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