The D-Day Memorial, 10 years later

Dedication Day for the D-Day Memorial on June 6, 2001 was a Big Deal. Any time you have the President of the United States at your event, it’s a Big Deal by definition.

As I recall, we staffed the dedication with six reporters and a couple of photographers. In terms of sheer numbers, that made it as important a story as the Virginia Tech shootings and the death of Jerry Falwell six years later.

The official unveiling on that hillside above Bedford came a little more than three months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a cataclysm that no doubt would have altered the euphoric mood. At the time, however, we were still unbloodied, unbowed, never invaded, and casting a proud and nostalgic look back at the heroics of the Bedford Boys and their D-Day brothers in arms.

It was hot that day, as might be expected in June, and the medical tent was doing a brisk business handling heat stroke cases. The bottled water ran out quickly. By 10:30 a.m. President George W. Bush — then a very new Commander in Chief — arrived in a motorcade about halfway through the proceedings, delivered a credible speech, and actually quoted from The News & Advance pre-event supplement a couple of times.

Realistically, there was no way the D-Day Memorial could remain at that exalted status for long. Bush’s motorcade left, the other dignitaries went home, and the veterans of the “Greatest War” continued dying off. By the end of that decade, all the Bedford Boys were gone. And the natural attrition continues — just yesterday, I noticed that two of the obituaries in our newspaper mentioned World War II service.

This leaves the D-Day Memorial at a transitional crossroads. For years, veterans came there, many of them in wheelchairs or attached to oxygen devices, to contemplate a time that must have seemed surreal to them in the 21st century. Eventually, they’ll stop coming. Even someone who enlisted at 17 in 1944, near the end of the war, would be 84 now. Most are in their late 80s or 90s.

Not that this necessarily makes the D-Day Memorial irrelevant. Although the last Civil War veteran died in the mid-1950s, the battlefields at Gettysburg, Antietam and, yes, Appomattox continue to attract a steady stream of tourists.

Yet D-Day didn’t happen in Bedford, Va., but on the beaches of France. Therefore, the D-Day Memorial can’t offer — like the Civil and Revolutionary War parks — that sense of awe at standing where history played out.

But it can still offer a lot in terms of education and reflection. The problem is, it needs to remake itself into a revolving — rather than static — attraction. I’m not suggesting a Normandy Amusement Park, just facilities to show movies and incorporate more interactive displays and offer more speakers. Bring it to the attention of the public on days other than traditional holidays. Give people an excuse to veer off the deep ruts of the interstates and find it.

I’m sure this is hardly a revolutionary idea to the people in charge there now. The problem is, all that would take lots of money. And while it’s admirable that a small group of visionaries from Roanoke and Bedford made this magnificent monument a reality, it seems obvious that the Memorial has — like so many of the WWII veterans who have visited it — run out of energy.

The federal government would seem an obvious choice to take it over, except that it, too, is strapped for cash. Eventually, I think, some sort of partnership will happen, and that will only be a good thing for the Memorial and for Bedford County.

In the meantime, there is still the memory of June 6, 2001 to cherish.