ALLIES LAND IN NORMANDY, 1994 : REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Letter From News Media’s Front Line : Coverage: The flacks bombed in England. The brass clanged in Italy. The President and Pope clashed.

Dear Mom,

By the time you get this, me and the guys will already (hopefully) be up on the bluff above Omaha Beach--in France!--so I guess I don’t have to worry about the censors anymore.

The old man says we sail tonight--even though the weather doesn’t look too good--so I wanted to share with you some of the special moments we’ve had these last few days serving under Supreme Allied Commander William J. (Clint) Clinton and his battle-hardened staff.

It’s been real interesting. Just in the last three days, we’ve killed off the British prime minister, wounded the president of Italy and argued with the Pope--the Pope!--in his own house. But I’ll tell you about all that later.

As I write this, I’m sitting in Portsmouth in a cold pub drinking warm beer. The next bar we see hopefully will be in Paris.

Clint and the Queen are out sailing around the harbor blessing the fleet in her huge yacht. It’s probably worth more than everything in Hickory Falls combined. There’s hundreds of boats out there getting ready to go to Normandy tomorrow. It’s pretty sad to think that some of them won’t be coming back.

Anyways, I got a glimpse of Her Majesty this morning and she seems like a pretty nice girl, even though she’s kind of old and she always wears these funny hats.

They had a religious service this morning they call a Drumhead Ceremony that goes back to the Middle Ages where they bless the warriors going off to battle. There were a bunch of archbishops and generals there, and it was neat to see the ships in the harbor behind them and know that in a few hours we’d all be headed for Normandy.

There were ceremonies all day--I think they do all that stuff to take our minds off what’s going to happen tomorrow. Most of the guys are pretty nervous, and you should hear some of the mean things they say about Clint in the mess when none of the officers are around, like how did he get four stars and he doesn’t even know how to salute right and a lot of the top people around him are jerks. There’s a lot of personal stuff too, that I won’t repeat for your tender ears.

But back to the things that happened the last few days.

Clint went to the Air Corps cemetery in Cambridge on Saturday to lay some wreaths and make a speech and then later met with this woman who I guess runs the Labor Party here, Margaret Beckett. They’re kind of like the Democrats back home, and he wanted to talk to her about health care and stuff, I guess. Anyway, they handed out this press release about her and it said that she took over the party after John Major died last month. Ha! John Major is the prime minister--a Conservative too--and he was perfectly alive when we saw him yesterday. They must have meant John Smith, the Labor guy who really did die in May.

That Clint, he’s got some real crackerjacks on his G-2 (intelligence) staff.

Clint went over to Italy a few days ago to do another cemetery thing and he had Jesse Brown, the head of Veterans Affairs, introduce the Italian president, a fellow named Oscar Luigi (really) Scalfaro. Anyways, Brown stumbled all over Scalfaro’s name, finally coming out with something that sounded like Scal-a-far-do. Some of the Italians there kind of giggled, which I thought was rude because it’s really impossible to pronounce most of their words.

When he was in Italy, Clint also went over to the Vatican to visit the Pope. The papers said they got into another argument about abortion and birth control. I can’t figure out why Clint feels he has to bring this up. It’s not like the Pope is going to change his mind on this.

Well, I’ve got to repack my stuff (for about the hundredth time) and go get on that horrible boat. I’m glad this is about to happen, even though it is pretty scary considering how messed up all the preliminaries have been.

Like the guy said, war is heck. But the chow’s been pretty good, especially in Italy. I’ll probably lose it all on the Channel.

Love,

Your war hero son.