Ghosts of war flicker across a lonely beach

Paris

As I thought about it later, it was a certain look in the eyes of the old soldiers that I remembered most. Uneasiness was there, and so was sadness, but there was puzzlement too in the distance of their expressions, as though some vast, elemental question was waiting to be answered.

I pondered this aboard a Eurostar train as it sped through the French countryside bound for London. I kept trying to define what the darkness of the look contained, a secret more significant than all the pageantry of D-day’s 60th anniversary observance overlooking the white expanse of Omaha Beach.

The shadow was noticeable in the eyes of Donny Smith, who at age 83 is confined to a wheelchair. He lisped slightly as he spoke and often paused abruptly as he pointed to the bombed and broken German gun emplacements that still stand on the cliff above the beach, like ancient artifacts of an empire that no longer exists.

His story was much the same as those of many of the soldiers who had returned to the beach, and so was that far-off look in his eyes as he searched for something that existed beyond memory, too large and terrible to fully comprehend. I tried getting at it, sitting with Smith at dinner the night before and walking next to him on the D-day anniversary, as his wife of 52 years, Ailene, pushed his wheelchair.

This was his third trip back to Omaha Beach, where he had come ashore as an assistant machine gunner, a 21-year-old draftee from Maine. He kept returning to Normandy, he said, to “just look around.” But it wasn’t the beach he wanted to see again and again, and it wasn’t the old gun emplacements, and it wasn’t the museums. It was something on the “other side” that beckoned him back.

Wisps of memory rushing by like clouds in a high wind called him to return to the place and time of what tour books say is “the most important day of the 20th century.” It was something that existed in the damaged souls of those who had seen too much in too short a space of violent time.

“Looking around at what?” I asked. He responded with a funny smile and a shrug. No answer. Just looking around, I suspect, for something he’ll never find.

Memories of war return at odd moments: during a dinner party or in a conversation with a friend or watching television or preparing to settle down for the night. You stop. You stare. You wait for the shard of time gleaming beyond the sight of recollection to come into full focus, but it seldom does.

It’s a frustrating experience. Moments during my war, the Korean War, flash by, and no matter how hard I try, they’re beyond memory, implanted in the core of being that defines not only who we are, but who we were.

I tried discussing that with Elza Jones, a slow-talking man of 80 who was sitting on an abutment that was part of a bridge over the Caen Canal, a bridge named Pegasus that was taken by British paratroopers. Our tour leader had taken us there to talk about the battle, but E.L., as he liked to be called, had bad legs and couldn’t follow the group up an incline.

He was resting with his head in his hands, and when I interrupted, he looked up slowly with a far-off expression that said he was someplace else. His eyes had that same slightly puzzled look that I’d seen in Donny Smith’s, a darkness behind the glow of large memories that hid smaller, more terrible ones.

E.L. had been a communications man with an infantry company, a 19-year-old hotel bellhop from Nashville whose military odyssey had led him to Omaha Beach. In a few short hours, more than half of the members of his company had been killed or wounded as they struggled ashore, and returning to the beach had him thinking about that more than he ever had before.

“Let’s just do it and get it done with,” he’d said to himself as the landing craft plowed toward the shoreline. When the ramp went down, it was like the gates of hell had opened. “It seemed unreal,” he said, wiping his brow against the deep heat of the day. “But I know it wasn’t.” He paused the way Smith had, and there was that searching look again, the quest for half a dream that rushed out of mind the moment it was perceived.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Oh, well.”

A scene flickered in my head later as our train streaked toward the tunnel under the English Chanel. My memory drifted back to the bottom of a hill in Korea. I looked around and saw the faces of young men, I heard loud gunfire and exploding mortars, and I knew we were about to ... about to what? The scene had vanished somewhere beyond time, hiding in that place in the brain that stores secrets.

My wife nudged me. She was studying my expression. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You look funny.”

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.