Unselfish act must not be forgotten

To the editor:
The old, small Gideon's Bible had seen a lot.
It's cover was hanging by a thread, and it had quite obviously been drenched with sweat numerous times
 Inside the front flap was written, Presented to Gaylord Grubbs of RR5 Portland, Indiana at Fort Benjamin Harrison. A SACRED TOKEN. US Army Reception. 6-10-1942.
This particular Bible was carried by my Grandpa's Brother's son all through North Africa, up through Sicily and Italy. Afterward, Gaylord had a brief break in the action and reported to a staging area in England in the late spring of 1944.
On June 6, 1944, Gaylord went ashore in the initial wave at Utah Beach into the massive onslaught upon Normandy, France.
Gaylord actually made it ashore in the face of withering fire from every conceivable angle. This in itself was a minor miracle, but as fate would have it, later the same day, his luck ran out.
He was literally blown apart at the hip/pelvis.
He miraculously survived this, but his steel dog tags were actually shredded along the edge by the shrapnel. The recovery and convalescence was arduous and lasted for many months. He was still bedridden in a full body cast a full six months later, when he was returned to Indiana.
My mother and other family pitched in to assist in caring for him. He literally had a wooden rod cast into the plaster between his knees to assist in moving him around.
After he healed, he ended up with a very pronounced limp, and one leg shorter than the other. I never heard him complain, and as so many of his generation did, he went on to a full life.
He founded Indiana Exterminating in Muncie in 1959, and owned and operated it until his retirement. The day of his burial was a hot summer day in August of 1996.
As I prepared for his funeral cortège to arrive at the gravesite, with the Honor Guard, I told the guys on the detail of his D-Day service. To a man they were all transfixed by his story
 It was quite an honor to fold and present his casket flag that day.
Gaylord was a true unsung hero of D-Day, and was one of the "lucky ones" he would occasionally say.
Visiting the cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer in 1987, I was quite stricken by just how daunting and impossible of a task it must have been, to take that landing if there was someone already ashore who didn't want you ashore. The commanding sight lines and the fields of fire from the gun emplacement fortifications, that are all still there, bear witness to just how much of a miracle those landings were on that day.
To quote the very young Stars And Stripes reporter, Andy Rooney, who followed in Gaylord's very footsteps onto Utah Beach four days afterward, he said, "the D-Day landings at Normandy were perhaps the most monumentally unselfish thing that one group of people ever did for another!"
I must admit that after seeing it for myself, he was not exaggerating a bit.
Gaylord went ashore on this day, 70 years ago, with the 315th Infantry Company E. His actions that day changed his life forever, but most importantly, his actions and those of the 60,000 others who went ashore that day, quite literally changed the world.
In many parts of France my experience was that we as Americans were not all that welcome and are not as popular as we would like to think that we are. This did not hold true up in the Northern Normandy Region of France, however.
Up there, they have not forgotten that great unselfish act to this day, and I certainly hope and trust that the world never forgets.
Sincerely,
James D. Fulks III
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