On June 6, 1944 — 80 years ago, to the date — some 73,000 American soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy, stormed into the Nazi machine gun fire, scaled the cliffs beyond the sand, and began the long, grueling task of taking back a continent. 2,501 of them — many teenagers, some in their early 20s — would never see the other side. “We were all kids between the ages of 17 and 24,” recalled one American veteran. When their boat touched the beach, “it was like a movie…the horizon just erupted.” “I didn’t know what was happening,” said another. “I only knew I had to do what I had to do.”
These were the men — boys, really — who we asked to kill for us. We asked them to run towards the gunfire, watch their friends die beside them, and be prepared to die themselves, if necessary. And they did so, without question. They were proud to do it. Thousands of underage American boys lied about their age, concocted stories about their birth dates, and forged their parents’ signatures to enlist. One D-Day veteran, Joseph Argenzio, was just 16 when he landed on the beaches of Normandy: “Argenzio wanted nothing more than to serve his country as his father had, with distinction and valor,” one account noted. (He didn’t tell his parents he had enlisted until after the fact). By the time he made it to France, he was “serving as part of the same division his father had in the last war.” Why was he so eager to join? Simple, he later said: “God and country.”
But what has become of the country these men fought for? Of the dwindling number of surviving veterans, some are no longer sure. At an event in Normandy yesterday commemorating the anniversary of D-Day, one World War II hero was asked what he thought of America today. “The real truth?” he grimaced. “I feel like a foreigner in my own country lots of times. And I don’t like it. It makes my heart real heavy.”
He wasn’t the first World War II veteran to notice as much. In 2022, Carl Dekle — a decorated veteran who joined the Marines in 1940, and won a Silver Star for his bravery in action against the Japanese — broke down into uncontrollable tears when asked the same question. Dekle, then celebrating his 100th birthday, told the interviewer:
The things we did, and the things we fought for, and the boys that died for it — it’s all gone down the drain. Our country’s going to hell in a hand basket. We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised. Not at all. Nobody will have the fun I had. Nobody will have the opportunity I had. It’s just not the same. That’s not what our boys — that’s not what they died for.
This sense — that something has gone terribly wrong in America; that our country is suddenly no longer our own — is not confined to the veterans of our wars, although it is perhaps most painful for them, as they gave the most to defend the thing we have lost. In surveys of white working-class voters performed in the run-up to the 2016 election, pollsters found that one of the strongest predictors of support for Trump was agreement with the statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” The sentiment isn’t solely the purview of the white working-class, nor even Trump supporters writ large: A 2019 Axios poll found that a full 60 percent of Americans felt the same, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and those not affiliated with either major party. While other polls have found that the national share of Americans who feel this way is closer to the mid-40s, majorities of Republicans consistently express agreement: 56 percent of Republicans in 2021 (PRRI), and 69 percent of “strong Republicans” in 2022 (University of Chicago).
Perhaps they’re right. Many Americans — particularly white, rural and exurban, Christian, conservative Americans, whose identity and way of life sit far outside of the centers of power in modern America — are rapidly learning that there is no place for them in the New America that their elites have devoted the past few decades to building. Those who still cling to the Old America — particularly those who fought for it in combat — are stuck with unanswerable questions, frozen on the tips of their tongues. It is a bewildering, disconcerting sensation to lose one’s country. When, how, and why the America that the boys of Normandy fought for disappeared are questions that we are only now learning how to ask. But they are questions we must ask, in earnest, lest we become a nation of amnesiacs and forget where we come from for good.
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