We met Remy and Francoise Chuinard at the B&B and followed them in Tim's car to the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. This was my first meeting with Remy, though I had corresponded with him over the past couple of years.

17 years old at the time of the Normandy landing, Remy has assembled a tremendous trove of information on the Ninth Air Force in Normandy, including a couple of thousand photographs. He found the site of the crash of Damon's Demon, my dad's P-47, dug at the site and found fragments of the plane, eventually sending me several pieces. Two years ago he took my daughter, Ondine, on this same tour.

At the American cemetery we went to the office where a woman brought up my father's information on a computer screen. In the drizzling rain she loaded the five of us into a large electric cart and took us to the grave. It was noon and a bell tolled the hour. A carillon began playing "God Bless America," and I thought I was going to lose it. I associated it with my childhood and Kate Smith, and it just got to me, representing the gratitude of the French to the Americans.

I wondered why our hostess was carrying a small white plastic bucket. At the grave I understood. She took some damp sand out of the bucket and rubbed the sand across the letters cut into the white marble cross. The sand stuck so that my father's name stood out clearly. She then took two Polaroids of the cross for us.

It was a beautiful spot in the quiet light rain, the misty beach and channel in the distance below us, the endless rows of identical crosses stretching across the immaculate green. We took pictures of each other by the cross and then walked to the overlook point and gazed down at Omaha Beach. Everyone who visits must be slightly stunned by the contrast of the present peacefulness with the bloody chaos that must have reigned on D-Day. Tim asked about a sign in French and Remy told him that it meant "Beware of wild boars." He quickly added, "Only at night."

We stopped by the office again on the way out and the woman checked on the computer to see if any other members of the 379th are buried there. She found one: Lt. Clough Gee III, West Pointer, who was killed a few weeks before my father. The insignia my father painted on his P-47 was "Bucephalus," a snorting white unicorn.

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