Student Writes a Portrait of Our Heroes

Just had to share this with everyone. C of O student Stephanie Ebling wrote this on the trip to Normandy for the 65th Anniversary of D-Day. Twenty C of O students accompanied ten WWII veterans for the trip. As you will learn, after reading Stephanie's diary entry, it was a life changing experience for both generations. Stephanie beautifully describes the men from the Greatest Generation. Please read and enjoy--simply precious.

Portrait of Our Heroes
By Stephanie Ebling

These are richly distinguished men whose poignant memories bring to life another age in our hearts. We taste the lives they once lived through their stories, but we can never understand. We only drink in the graciousness of their presence, their humble dignity, their wisdom, and an unyielding certainty that gives them each a gentle type of authority. This quiet gravity is like a mystery that draws us to them, in awe of the lives they have lived.

Their honor has been earned and appointed them, but they are burdened with the weight of the memories that still silently haunt them, that still isolate them from their wives, their families, and a younger generation. The fears these recollections keep alive are clearly a part of the sacrifice that they were proud to make. These memories are the enemy that stayed with them, following them home and through their lives all these years. This enemy remained after their uniforms were put away, after their weddings, after their babies were born. This enemy was there while they paid off their mortgages, and still there after the last child went off to college. And I think that the clarity of purpose in the war they were involved in has helped to quiet these fears over time…a certainty that must come with such a just cause. Surely that understanding has helped them as they bravely fought these ghosts of the past, making them stronger each day, year after year, decade after decade. Their faith has been strengthened by practice, and now, as old men, it is clear to me that today, they are at their strongest. And so now I realize something very unexpected. They are greater men now than when they jumped out of a plane or charged off of a Higgins boat 65 years ago. For although their bodies are slowly failing, what is left is a priceless outcome that must certainly come from such a lasting sacrifice—gentle, selfless strength. The kind of strength that makes you wonder what the hell you will ever do for anybody that will give you the right to tread the earth for another seventy years and deserve to enjoy it with such vivacious relish, this passion and fulfillment that each of these men seem to have in common.