Each generation finds the war tools of the previous generation to be puny toys.

  I think this while wandering around the tanks and howitzers of the Imperial War Museum in London. There are plenty of school kids about, scribbling in notebooks and clambering on the equipment when no one is looking.

  Watching the children, I think of a story I heard yesterday. A British ordinance expert trying to devise bombs that would shatter two Ruhr-area electric dams watched his kids skimming rocks across a pond. Eureka! He quickly devised a round bomb that could be "skipped" over the water against the dam walls.

  The child-inspired bombs worked, too, although of the 19 Lancaster bombers who came in 60 feet off the deck, eight didn’t return and neither did 53 of their crew. Fifty-three lives traded for less enemy electricity.

  In another part of the museum, a group of blue-uniformed kids are being taught by their pretty teacher about the 1940 London Blitz. Maybe fifth grade. She’s asking them questions, just like teachers always do. She asks what deprivations the ancestors of these children suffered. "Remember, we’re an island nation," she reminds. "Chocolate," says a red-haired boy. "Bananas," says the girl next to him.

Just next to the two 15-inch naval guns in front of the Imperial War Museum is the Tibetan Peace Garden, dedicated in 1999 by the Dalai Lama himself.

Portsmouth Harbor: The D-Day armada left from here. Shimmering and breezy, green and glorious and given over to whirling Frisbees and romping puppies and the harbor waters given over to privileged sail and cargo ships of the Dole Pineapple Fleet.

  And on the day of June 5, 1944, 200,000 people choked these streets, the size of a city like Alexandria, and by the next morning that city was gone, had climbed aboard 6,000 ships and disappeared without a trace, except for a few chalked messages like "Sorry, Jeanne. Had to go, Johnny."

  And on the day of June 6, 1944, the streets of Plymouth were deserted and it was said the place felt like a dull knife.

Channel Crossing: We cross on a member of the Brittany Ferry fleet, but like no ferry you ever saw at the end of Jackson Avenue. Nine decks high, with boutiques, bars and a theater showing Men of Honor, starring Robert DeNiro and Cuba Gooding Jr. As we plodded our six-hour way across the English Channel, we dined on asparagi and truffles while listening to a brandy-sipping pianist play Cole Porter on his Yamaha.

  Several in our party remarked on the "irony" of our trip over compared to the D-Day trip over. We moderns just can’t seem to leave "irony" well enough alone.

Today was blustery and cold and completely in tune with the slushy, lovely countryside of Normandy. Horse country. Cattle country. Fields of wind-wrinkled lush green broken by bright yellow fields of raabe. The sea-soaked coast, alternately beach and cliff.

  We stop at a high hill with a German observation post and a battery of four 155-mm cannon, deeply embedded in reinforced-concrete bunkers. On D-Day, the German positions were ceaselessly pounded by Allied planes and ships. Each of the bunkers is pockmarked by hits along its sides and tops, yet none collapsed or even cracked.

  Except if you look inside of Gun No. 1, you can see shreds of concrete hanging from ceiling and wall. It seems as if a single shell, fired a dozen miles offshore by H.M.S. Ajax, passed right through the narrow firing port and detonated in the bunker’s ammo supply. The dozen or so men inside must have heard the coming shell whipping through the air like a whetted knife through stretched silk. But they would not have had time to wonder at the impersonal fact of being obliterated by someone who never saw you, someone doing geometry and pressing buttons.

  Right through their firing port, something like hitting a man in the eye with a BB fired from a block away. Had they lived, the German gunners might have laughed at the way fate is just as blind as justice and maybe they are twins. It is that lottery luck that gives war its only humor, that of the black variety of course.

"But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt … and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a case which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use." – Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1895

Time for a story about one of our own. Carencro, La., close enough to be called one of our own.

  John Ray was his name. He was one of a cluster of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne who jumped into Normandy the night before D-Day. Ray’s little cluster got blown slightly off course and the parachutes of two of them, John Steel and Ken Russell, got hooked on the gargoyles protruding from the top of the church of St. Mere-Englise.

  The dangling Russell looked down and saw a red-haired German soldier ready to shatter him with a sub-machine gun. Just then, Ray hit the pavement nearby. The German wheeled around and fired a burst into Ray’s chest. As the German turned his attention back to Russell, however, the dying Ray shot and killed his killer.

  Because of that, Ken Russell lives to this day and he told Ron Drez the story of John Ray. So whenever Drez visits the American cemetery on the cliff above Omaha Beach, he seeks out the marker for Ray’s grave and sticks a little flag there.

  Last year, Drez arranged to have Ray’s widow visit the grave for the first time. The widow was uncertain – after all, she and Ray had only been married a week. After the war she had moved on to another life, married, raised children.

  Drez stood back as the former Mrs. John Ray approached the grave. She stood there perfectly still and then said, "I’ve finally come. You promised me you were coming back."

Big Dave from small-town Pennsylvania was always the last one on the bus. You could count on it.

  Because Dave is not only big but fragile. Plenty of bulk on bad knees and a crummy hip adds up to a walking stick and a very deliberate way of getting around. A little gruff, too.

  Not that Dave had to keep up with a fast crowd. Most on the bus were older couples, though there was a husky young forest ranger from Montana, a recently discharged Navy veteran from Louisiana, Mo., and the 26-year-old education director of the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

  Probably a representative sample of the American tourist: a drinker or two and a braggart or two, but mostly well-meaning and respectful. Humor was provided intentionally by the Epstein twins, Herb and Sammy, and unintentionally by a retired cop named Harry, who dropped his camera in a urinal on the third day.

  The day we went to Omaha Beach was something. We walked down a steep hillside and picked our way along the sand. Even the untrained eye could see how the German defenders had been able to turn Omaha into a butcher’s block. The way off the beach was steep, there was enfilade fire up and down the beach, and many of the green American troops and been shocked into a kind of lethal inertia by the savagery of it all. They lay like prototypes of their primeval ancestors who first crawled out from the sea and wondered what happens next.

  Ron Drez gathered the group around and told the story of the Brigadier Norman Cota, who had boldly walked up and down the beach telling soldiers: "There’s only two kinds of men on this beach! Those that are dead and those that are going to die! Move forward and get off this beach!"

  Our group seemed to think on this for a while. Then Drez cheerfully pointed up to the horizon and said, "There’s our next stop, the American cemetery up there."

  "Up there" looked to be a steep hill a hundred feet high. A nervous titter ran through the group, but Omaha Beach is no place to act like a sissy, so off we went. At a low spot, everyone had to take off their shoes and wade though cold water for some 25 or 30 yards.

  Then the climb began. There were stone steps all the way up, switchbacked and steep. For many, if not most, it was a few steps at a time and then a pause to listen to a privileged body’s inner voice scream protest.

  We reached the top in sweaty pairs and gasping singles. And each new arrival stopped to catch a breath and wait for the next arrival. There was a group spirit about this thing that hadn’t been in evidence before.

  Last of course was Big Dave. One of the younger guys had hung back to be a travel buddy. One step on those burdened knees, then a slow second one. Then a reach up with the walking stick, and the whole thing again.