The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - D-Day 80 -- A Spy Story, a Love Story, a Canadian Story.
Episode Date: September 4, 2024Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on June 4th. One of my favourite journalists, Nahlah Ayed, brings to lightĀ a little-known Canadian story that centres around preparati...ons for D-Day.Ā It really is at its heart a loveĀ story, but it's also a spy story with all the twists and turns that both elements can deliver.Ā Another D-Day special as this week marks 80 years since that historic day.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
And lo there, Peter Mansbridge here.
Yes, it is a Wednesday Encore Edition,
and we go back to earlier this summer,
around the time of the anniversary of D-Day,
when one of our special shows was a feature interview
with Nala Ayyad, the journalist,
former colleague of mine at the CBC,
and her new book.
It's been very well received.
It's been on the top ten of the bestseller list throughout the summer, still is now.
Here's our conversation about her new book.
And hello again, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Tuesday on the Bridge,
on a week where we are marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
The actual D-Day anniversary is Thursday.
Yesterday, we told you about many of the particulars
of what happened on that day and Canada's involvement in it
with the British historian James Holm.
Today, we're taking a different angle,
and I'm going to tell you more about it in a moment.
Let me tell you about today's guest.
She's a friend and a colleague.
I've known Nala Ayyad for, I don't know, 20 years, more than 20 years.
I've worked with her, obviously, in my days anchoring the National out of Toronto,
but I used to travel a lot, and I saw Nala a lot in different locations around the world,
and usually some pretty dicey places. She's this brave, courageous, smart
journalist who liked to cover the story from angles that
many people weren't covering them.
They give us a greater context and understanding of
whatever the issue might be that was unfolding in front of us.
So I obviously have enormous admiration for Noah.
And she left television not long after I did.
There was no connection to that.
It just happened to be.
But she got this terrific offer from the CBC radio program Ideas, where she's the host
and loving the opportunity to tell stories in a different venue, different platform.
And hopefully you followed her there as well.
But Nala is also, and has always been, an accomplished writer, but she's written this book that we're going to talk about today
as her second book.
Her first book, A Thousand Farewells.
That one was a finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Awards.
This one, which has just come out,
is called The War We Won Apart.
And as the book cover says,
it's the untold story of two elite agents, spies,
who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II.
One was a Canadian, the other would eventually become a Canadian.
Their story is a story of spying.
Their story is a story of love.
Their story is a story of behind the scenes
in the days leading up to D-Day.
And it's told with fascinating detail.
I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.
And it will lead you to the bookstore.
Because this is a book you don't want to miss.
All right.
Well, let's do what we did yesterday.
We'll take our one break.
We'll take it now so we don't interrupt the storytelling.
And then we will ā so we'll take the break now.
We'll come right back right after this.
And welcome back.
You're listening to The Bridge right here on Sirius XM,
Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Our guest today, Nala Ayed,
about her book, The War We Won Apart.
It's a part of our special D-Day coverage this week. Thursday
is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And yesterday we had James Holland, the British historian
on, talking about all the particulars about D-Day, and especially as it related to Canada's
rule. And today Nala Ayyad with an incredible story that she tells in her new book.
So enough from me.
Well, actually, I have to do my normal big long preamble before the first question.
But I think you'll understand why.
Here's our conversation with Nala Ayed.
So, Nala, I want to start with an admission, really.
So bear with me for a minute because it takes a minute to tell this story.
But as you know, because we worked on some of them together,
I did a lot of shows that relate to the kind of stories that are in this book,
whether it was D-Day or
V-Day or Remembrance Day, what have you. And I always enjoyed those programs because of the
people we were talking with and the experiences they'd had. But one thing was common to my telling
of the story was that I would get a phone call almost immediately after every show from my aunt
who lived well into her 90s who worked for the during the war was with the RAF the Royal Air
Force she was one of those people when you watch old movies from the second world war you saw
women who were around a table plotting with little aircraft while the officers were looking down to see
where all the different planes were.
She did that first in England, and then she went into France right after D-Day.
She was one of the first ones there who was doing that in the airfields that the Allies
started using in France.
But she would call me, and she would say, Peter, you always forget to talk about the women.
It wasn't just a man's war.
Obviously, it was predominantly men in the battlefield, but there were a lot of yours in the wars you've covered and in the story you tell here.
Talk to me about that element for a minute.
Well, I mean, you put your finger right on the pulse.
And as you say, we'll talk about the book for a minute. But almost all the stories I did abroad were somehow, some way connected to two topics, either immigration, you know, the movement of people and displacement or war and conflict.
And specifically in war and conflict, although there's so many facets to it and the two are connected, obviously, I was, am very interested in women in war, partly because, as you say, their stories somehow are overlooked, or they're far more nuanced than what the worlds in war. So both the combat and the supply side of things
and the protests and the rearing of children
in the old days and still today, obviously.
But in so many ways, women's experiences in war,
I find are overlooked, but far more complete
as a picture of what was going on
than when you just look at
those who are fighting. And so I've always, in war zones, always went to women, always tried to get
to the stories of the women, to go into the homes in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or other places,
Gaza, you know, talk to the women to find out what's really going on beyond what's happening
on the front lines. So it's a passion of mine,
absolutely. And this story falls right within that category.
Well, it certainly does. And it's a great time, obviously, to be telling it because we're just
approaching the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And where the image is of one of men dropping out of planes on the night before D-Day, men
hitting the beaches on D-Day, men defending on D-Day from the German side.
And in all those images, you don't see women.
But in fact, in this book, we find out, and I love the way the title on the cover, The Untold Story.
I can't pass by a book, especially that's about, you know, the Second World War or the First World War, that headlines The Untold Story.
Because you think you know everything, right?
Of all the things we've heard over the years.
Yeah.
But this, we didn't know about it.
And, you know, it's about a lot of different things,
but part of it is about what happened six days before D-Day and a woman dropping out of the skies
as part of the team to, you know, kind of prepare the ground in some ways.
Tell us how you came about this story. Like, you know, some of it was kind of known, but really the bigger picture was untold, as you say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some of it was known.
It has been told in a few bits and pieces.
And some attempts had been made to tell the big story, but no one had kind of brought it all together into one place.
So my entry point, Peter, is just like exactly what you just described.
I mean, I was based in London as a foreign correspondent. It was, as you know, part of our job every year to mark the anniversary of D-Day,
go to Normandy and do the story of hopefully someone that Canadians hadn't heard about,
a story that deserved to be told, and met so many veterans, both on the anniversaries,
but also prior to that, people who are visiting or stories of those who had passed.
This particular year, 2019, my last year in London, you'll know this name of one of our most talented producers, Stephanie Jenser, told me, you know, the Juneau Beach Center is honoring women who were involved in D-Day.
And I thought, oh, well, tell me more.
And so she told me about Sonia D'Artois. And I had never
heard of her. And I certainly had never heard of the Special Operations Executive, which is the
organization that she was serving in and had participated in. And so what they were doing
were honoring her, putting some of her personal possessions at the Juno Beach Center for people
to look at, kind of like a museum, a little cigarette case, a little compact, a silver one on a display. And
there we met her family and met her daughter, Nadia Murdoch, and her grandchildren. And suddenly,
for weeks afterwards, after the story aired, I should tell you, Peter, that I had more reaction
to that story than almost any other story I've done about D-Day or related to Canada's participation in the Second World War.
And especially women and young women writing me saying, how is it that we don't know about this woman?
How is it that we don't know this story?
And by the way, that story was focused on Sonia.
I did just do Sonia's story.
But, well, there's a lot more to Sonia's story than just her.
Her husband was also a member of the SOE, and that's how they met.
We can get into that.
But I could not get her story out of my head because I found her to be a compelling character.
She was 19 years old when she signed up.
She had never, well, I don't know 100%, but as far as I could tell,
her experience did not include, you know, ever being around firearms or jumping out of planes.
In fact, she was afraid of heights.
And I couldn't get her out of my mind.
So I called up her daughter, Nadia, months later and just said, has anyone ever written a book about this?
And here we are five years later.
Now, the person who would become her husband, Guy D'Artois, was a Canadian.
Yeah, exactly.
She was not a Canadian.
No, she was a British, a young British woman who had spent most of her childhood in France,
which made her the perfect candidate for the Special operations executive because they wanted people,
women and men, and the women came later once they realized that women were very well suited for the
role, to be able to pass as locals. And so they would be dropped behind enemy lines, not just in
France, by the way, other Canadians, this is also a revelation to me. Other Canadians were dropped in several parts of Europe and beyond. Canadians with hyphenated identities, Yugoslav Canadians, Italian Canadians, Japanese Canadians, but in this case, French, and her case, French-British, or British who spoke French, to help assist the resistance in preparation for D-Day.
And so she was a perfect candidate.
She not only knew how to speak French, but she knew how to be French.
She knew how to drink coffee the way French women did.
She knew how to dress how they did.
This was all natural to her.
It wasn't an act.
And so she was an ideal candidate, at least from that perspective.
Well, so she goes into ideal candidate, at least from that perspective. Yeah.
Well, so she goes into training where she meets her husband.
And I love that part of the story because it happens in a small town on the western side of Scotland.
Not far from you. Not far from me. In a building which became a hotel,
which I've stayed at a couple of times.
Oh yeah, wow. And they would tell the story in the hotel,
you know, this used to be a spy school during the Second World War. The British Special Operations Executive came in.
This is kind of like Canada's, you know, special operations branch,
like JTF2, all that kind of stuff.
And they said this was that school because it's kind of remote in the area
it's in.
But as soon as they told me this story, because, you know,
I love these second world war stories.
And all I could imagine was these hallways were filled with these young people,
mostly young, who were learning to do the kind of things you're talking about,
whether it was jumping out of planes, how to fight hand-to-hand combat,
how to kill, how to hide the compass inside the cigarette package
or what have you.
Exactly.
But that also became this place where the two of them met,
fell in love, eventually to get married,
which was a problem given the jobs they had.
Yes.
Talk about that.
You cut out, given the what? Given the what they had? The jobs.
The jobs they had, yeah.
Yeah, there was just a blip when you said that word.
When I went into the archive, I found documents in which the instructors debated whether it was a good idea for those two to be married.
The reason being, the concern was that if they were deployed into France together, and
should one or both of them end up in the hands of the Gestapo or anyone else, that they would
be, one would be tortured in front of the other and thereby extracting information.
And so that they would be used against each other to try to extract information.
And so it was felt that it would be a security risk for both of them to be deployed together.
On the other hand, some instructors in those documents would say it might actually be a strength for them to be together
because Sonia, they felt some of them were very harsh in their assessment of her
ability to work. And they felt that perhaps the two of them going together might be a good thing.
So this debate raged on in the background while those two were planning their wartime wedding,
you know, a very simple affair in Marlebone at Spanish Place. They were married in their uniforms her mother, her stepmother
made the cake, you know there were no flowers
she had a silk shirt that was
all she, sort of her only nod
to tradition and just a small
number of people who attended this wedding
and thinking that they were going to be deployed
together and in fact
even the head of the SOE
the F section of the SOE Morris Morris Buckmaster, was at the wedding. Ultimately, it was his job after it was done and after the honeymoon to tell the two of them actually he had decided that they would not be deployed together. It was a, well, if you are going to send me with my husband,
then I'm not going to go at all. And so she rejected the idea of being deployed at all.
So she watched her husband fly off. She escorted him. She went to the airfield for him preparing
to leave. And as soon as he took off, Buckmaster assumed she would go back to her original job and
asked her,
is there anything I could do? And she said, yeah, you can send me on a mission as soon as possible.
She couldn't resist. She decided to go. And so a week later, she was on her way to a different
part of France. You know, earlier you said, it's incredible that we don't know these stories. Like
when you talk to other people about them and they say, wow,
I've never heard of that.
Or why didn't we know about this?
You just know that if this story was an American story or this story was a
British story or a French story,
there would be books and movies that have been out for years by now.
These would be two national heroes, right?
And celebrities in nonfiction films and books.
School kids would know their names.
Well, thanks to you, they're now getting to know them.
But those scenes, like the one you just described,
I mean, I can see that.
I can see that i can see
that in the theater right you know everybody'd be weeping and my god it's yeah and it's only
halfway through the movie right um so she gets on the plane sorry go ahead you're gonna say
no i was gonna say there is so much drama like that in the story peter there is so much i mean
i don't want to cut you you're off you're you're um the way you're going about the story, Peter. There is so much. I mean, I don't want to cut you off the way you're
going about the story, but I just want to say this was, I mean, even the fact that she was so
underestimated in her training. And then when they come back, going back to your beginning,
which was so apt about this being about women, you know, she comes back, they are considered heroes,
but not a lot of people know the story, of course, because by nature, their role was meant to be kept quiet. And so there was a lot of discussion about what
they did. And so when it was time for them to be bestowed with honors, you know, there was a debate,
should they be getting military honors, you know, an MBE military or one that was civilian. And what
was eventually decided on,
and I see this in the documents from the archive,
is that they would get civilian awards.
Well, one of the women, Pearl Wetherington,
one of the better known SOE agents,
rejected the MBE and said,
I'm not, this is member of the British,
the order, member of the order of the British Empire,
quite an honor, but they were given civilian ones when the men were given military ones. And so she went back and said, I'm not
taking this award. There was nothing civil about what I did. And so a year later, this kind of
rebellion by the women themselves ended up in the king changing, actually changing their honors to military ones.
Sonia included.
She too had her award changed from military to civilian.
So this was very much about them proving their presence.
And again, just to go back to your point, just dramatic point after dramatic point.
You can imagine that moment as well when you finally get the letter saying,
yeah, actually what you did deserves the kind of recognition that the men had as well well
um take us to that six-day period before before d-day sonia drops what happens What does she do? The first thing that happens is that she has a bad landing and she injures herself. She blacks
out briefly. The second thing that happens is that she loses track of the trunks that were
supposed to come with her, full of beautiful French-made clothes that were supposed to
support her story as someone who works for a high-end fashion house.
So those are displaced and she couldn't find them.
Third thing is she couldn't find her reception committee.
And so she had to pull out her gun, couldn't disentangle herself from the parachute.
So there she is, you know, with the parachute hanging, you know,
she's dragging it behind her, her small pistol in her hand,
trying to find her reception committee.
So given the fact that she could not find her clothes, they had to assume that they were picked
up by a German convoy. And so they had to also assume that the Germans were thus alerted that
there was a young parachutist who had just arrived in the area. So what does she decide to do?
She decides to live openly, to do the opposite of what would be expected of an agent landing
behind enemy lines.
So she begins to go to the black market restaurants where German officers would dine.
And she would sit there openly and be friendly and just to kind of deflect the idea that
she was someone who wasn't supposed to
be where she is. In the meantime, while she does this, she's helping the circuit leader,
you know, recruit more young men. She's helping organize parachutes from London with more weapons.
She's helping organize training sessions for the young Maquis who had never worked with weapons that were from abroad.
And so she was instrumental as a trainer.
She was helping the young men and women to learn how to ambush convoys,
how to use some of the weapons that were being parachuted.
So, you know, she is living two lives while she's there. And then the final thing, sorry, the final thing, the last layer to all of this is that she also realizes very shortly after she gets there that her circuit leader, the person who's in charge of her organization that she's supposed to serve as a courier, was a man she had dated briefly back when she was in London.
So that adds a lot of intrigue to the story as well.
And a lot of heartache.
There's every possible twist and turn here.
That, you know,
the part about her decision to sort of live openly,
put herself in direct contact with some of the enemy showed obviously a streak of incredible courage.
But at the same time, put her in the line of a potential fire, so to speak, in terms
of retribution when all this ended.
Absolutely.
I mean, when you consult the vast amount of information that's out there, which is all, by the way, thanks to a woman who was Vera Atkins, who was sort of the second in command pretty much at the SOE.
Thanks to her, there's a great amount of information about how captured agents were dealt with by the Nazi regime. I mean, it was horrific what they did to civilians.
It's unspeakable what they did in concentration camps and to citizens all around Europe,
to Jewish people in particular. Millions of people perished in those concentration camps.
Also, anyone who's suspected of being an agent
often met the same fate.
And so the danger was immense.
She had one incident, Sonia, where,
and as they were training,
they heard about some of these stories
because even as they are training,
one of the biggest circuits in France is unraveling. And some radios, some wireless radios are commandeered by German forces. And so sometimes agents would land into the hands of the Gest. Some of them would end up in concentration camps. Some would end up at intelligence headquarters in Paris where they were brutally tortured to try to get some information out of them.
And so all of this is in the background.
All of this is in Sonia's mind as she is sitting in some of those restaurants trying to pretend to be a local. And one time, this is really when it comes to brings to the fore the danger.
She drops her purse on the floor.
She's surrounded by German officers with a purse drops with a thud.
An unmistakable thud of a firearm.
And next to her was an officer who politely reached over to try to help her.
And she snatched it just in time, because had he lifted it, he would have realized from the
weight of it that there was something like, that they were not ordinary belongings in this purse,
that there was perhaps a firearm in there and she would have been done for.
There's another great scene for the movie.
We know that's going to happen.
Besides the danger, the potential danger of the Germans finding her out,
there was also the very real danger of when the war came to a close,
or at least when France was liberated,
that there were going to be French who would wonder about whether or not those evenings in the bars or the cafes
with the Germans were collaboration. Absolutely. Yes. And, you know, she was mistaken for a German
girl often, to use her words, German girl. She was mistaken for a German girl often, to use her words, German girl. She was mistaken for a German girl often
because she was blonde. And often when she would leave those restaurants, sometimes people would
spit in her direction because they suspected her being a collaborator. And so at the very,
when Le Mans was liberated, which is quite early on after the landings, it was on August 8th, early on compared to the rest of
the country. It was one of the first cities to be liberated. She was accosted very briefly by
people who were looking to exact revenge against those who were collaborating in whatever way.
And so she was being taken to the middle of town where they had gathered a number
of women who had been consorting with German officers and had their heads shaved and paraded
around town to humiliate them. And she was being taken by two armed men towards the scene to be
treated in exactly this way. And if it hadn't been for some of the men she had served with,
she was screaming at the
top of her lungs and trying to get their attention, who vouched for her and said, no, actually, she is
one of us, quote unquote, the resistance. She would have met a difficult fate in the middle
of Le Mans at the hands of French patriots. I hate to cut the story short but there's got to be a reason to read the book too
it's filled with little moments like this
tell me
once the war is over and the celebration
has ended they decide to come back to Canada
yes
and they settle in Canada.
And do they sort of like drift into the background?
I mean, here's this great story that's not getting told.
They don't drift immediately into the background.
Sonia makes it her business to drift into the background. She maintained all along that the war was past,
that it was part of her life, but not her whole life.
And so after an initial flurry,
and it was quite a flurry of pictures
and front pages and interviews,
and as you can imagine,
their story was very compelling.
You know, two agents who married, you know, who parachuted behind enemy lines and who are now coming home to make Canada home really made a lot of headlines.
And journalists were clamoring from all over North America to interview them.
But eventually, yeah, they do.
They do meld into the background.
Sonia wants to focus on raising a family. Guy wants to have a
military career that he builds one posting at a time. And yet, Peter, they were very aware that
their story was so compelling because Guy kept everything. He kept documents, he kept articles,
he kept photographs, all kinds. In fact, he had lots of things photographed in the war zone itself. But he kept a treasure trove of material, which the book about the story. But he never had the chance to. And the family had hoped that one day the story would be told.
And it's a privilege to be the one to begin to tell the story because, Peter, there's no way I told this entire story.
There's still so much more to find out. I hope others might be interested enough to do some more digging.
But I think it reminds us of two things, Peter.
Like I think the reason this story is important to me
is one, just on that point,
it's a good reminder that this is a country
that's built on immigrants.
And every single family in this country
from wherever part of the world they come from
has somehow had a brush with conflict or war.
And those stories, I heard R.H. Thompson say this on the CBC not too far ago,
that every family has a story like this, a war story of some kind.
And these are stories that need to be told.
And so, you know, I've told stories about war all over the world.
And this is a chance to tell a Canadian story. Even though they had
passed, I feel that it was a story that I wanted to tell because it's important. It's our history,
it's this country's history and we need to know it. So yeah, it's a privilege to be able to tell
it. How has their family handled this through the generations now, the children, grandchildren?
They're immensely proud of their parents.
So I met them at the Juneau Beach Center in 2019, and two generations came to honor their grandmother and their mother.
They're very proud of the story, and they themselves have made attempts to tell the story as well um yeah and i know that they're gratified that um their parents story is finally told
in more detail than had been before no well they're lucky they're lucky i guess the gens
are said to you you know you why don't you do think about that Sonia story and where it led?
Because, you know, it's a terrific book.
Just, you know, the picture on the front cover of the two of them,
I don't know, I can't remember now.
Is that Wedding Day?
That is Wedding Day.
Yeah, that's the Marlboro.
Yeah.
But it's such a wonderful picture.
And when you, I keep looking back at it as I hear one anecdote after another.
And you're looking at these two remarkable people because they look just like your normal wartime couple, right?
Everybody's in uniform in those days or approaching it.
But here, the secrets they knew, the secrets they'd learned, it's amazing. It's
great. You gave us a sense of what your takeaway is, just as a last question. Give me more on that.
What this experience of learning their story has meant to you.
As I said, every family, I venture to say almost every family in this
country has had a history that somehow brushes against a conflict or war. And I think that's
part of the story of this country. And we can't lose sight of the stories. We need to tell those
stories. And so I laud Nadia from the family and others, you know, people that I work with who
have recorded their parents,
you know, she had her mom interviewed for hours on end. And so one lesson I say is go, you know,
go record the elders in your family, like go tell, go ask them what stories you need to know,
because it's part of the fabric of your story and part of the fabric of this country's story.
So that's number one. And two, I think, I hope the story is kind of a reminder of the, of, you know, of what happens when book burning authoritarians, you know, are on the ascendant. And also the cost of war, the perils of war, and the fact that it's often the young who pay the disproportionate price. And I think those lessons are as important today as they were back
then. And if we think we're immune, I think we're wrong. And so I'd like to think that this story is
partly a reminder of that, that wars really, once they start, often they don't end and they affect
everyone, generations on.
Nala, it's so good to talk to you. And for longer than 30 seconds or a minute, we used to
get at the end of some of your items. Oh, it's so great. To have a half an hour to talk about
this wonderful piece of work. And I do mean that. So congratulations on the book and much success
with it. Thanks, Nala. Thank you, Peter. It's a pleasure to talk to you again.
Isn't she great? Told you. Nala Ayyad.
Currently the host of Ideas on CBC Radio.
An outstanding journalist from her
days covering the world for both radio and television.
And now an outstanding author with another really good book.
And I hope you, if you were fascinated by just a hint of some of the stories
that are in this book, based on our conversation,
then you should go out and grab it.
The War We Won Apart, Nala Ayyad, is your author.
And you should be able to find that at any bookstore or online.
In fact, I know you can find it in either one of those places.
A couple of thoughts from me.
Tomorrow, it's our Wednesday Encore Edition,
and tomorrow we will rerun Monday's show with James Holland
to get you set up for Thursday on D-Day.
You know, as I said to James, and I mentioned about Nala,
because we've both been to the Normandy beaches a number of times on the programs we did together,
that it is, you know, keep in mind,
I think you all know the basic story.
There were five beaches where the Allies landed.
Two of them were American beaches, Omaha and Utah.
Two of them were British beaches, Sword and Gold.
And then there was the Canadian beach,
Juneau. I've been on all of them.
I've walked all of them. I've been into the areas around the
cemeteries where the dead of that day are buried.
And I've got to tell you, the Canadian, I mean, at this time of year, you
know, I think the first one I was at was the 50th anniversary, then the 55th, the 60th,
the 65th, the 70th. Now we're looking at the 80th coming up. It takes on a life of its own.
There's kind of a, not a carnival atmosphere,
but there is a certain degree of people dressing up in the style of that time, both militarily and civilian-wise.
There are a lot of vehicles around that either pretend to be
or are, in fact, from that era.
And, you know, there are around the cemetery at Omaha Beach,
which, you know, was the scene in Saving Private Ryan.
There's, you know, hot dog stands and all of that around outside the cemetery.
But, I mean, it's a real event.
And people hawking and selling different stuff.
Not so at the Canadian beach.
It feels like very, especially the cemetery.
We talked about it yesterday, BennyƩni-sur-Mer.
It's set aside.
It's kind of outside the main area from the beaches,
kind of alone out in the fields.
It's very solemn, but it's Canadian,
and you feel that when you're there.
And in the towns like Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer,
Cousseau-sur-Mer, and others,
it's not the same as I just kind of mentioned
around the American one.
And that's not a slight on anybody.
It's just this is different.
We are different.
We're different than Americans.
We're different than the Brits. We have our own
style. And
I kind of find it in there. But we're all together
on the common purpose of remembering, right?
Remembering what these young fellows and young women
did at that time,
why they did it, the sacrifices that were involved,
and that we have a duty not to forget and a duty to remember
and a duty when we're able to acknowledge.
And if that simply means standing next to a gravestone
of somebody you don't even know, or never knew,
or know their family.
But you look at that, what's engraved on there,
and you see that young fellow was 19 years old.
Gone.
In some cases, in a matter of seconds
after hitting the beach.
Never knowing
whether that day was going to be successful or not.
But we know,
and we know to remember and to thank for it.
And I hope you enjoyed that,
our conversation with Nala Ayed
from earlier this summer, around the time of the D-Day anniversary, the beginning of June.
We'll be back tomorrow with our regular Thursday, Your Turn edition, and the Random Ranter, right here on Sirius XM, channel 167. Thank you.