OMAHA BEACH, France -- Then, all was noise and turmoil and confusion.
Fifty years later, Robert Sales still can hear the scream of incoming mortars, still smell the stench of artillery powder, still see the pools of blood, dark in the sand.
But all is quiet now on Omaha Beach. Only the rumble of the tide and the call of distant sea gulls can be heard. Only a rotted section of the Allies' artificial harbor remains.
To this tranquil shore Bob Sales returns, an old man who must clutch tight another's arm as he steps gingerly across a rock wall onto the beach.
He came here, he says simply, for the sand. "I'd like to have a little of it sifted on my grave when they cover me up," says Sales, 68.
"I could have gone anywhere to get sand. But this is Omaha Beach sand. A lot of blood was spilled on it. A lot of those up in that cemetery bled on it and died on it."
President Clinton and 13 other heads of state honor the 50th anniversary of D-Day in official ceremonies today. But it's the private tributes of weathered soldiers like Sales that truly attest to the profound impact of the invasion that changed the world - and the lives of the men who took part in it.
Many have returned again and again to the battlefields of their youth, but some of the 35,000 veterans here are back for the first time. For years, work or money kept them away. Or perhaps, painful, terrible memories.
For Sales, coming back to France "just never fell into place." He was too busy making his fortune in timber and real estate and race horses. He traveled to the Kentucky Derby 17 years in a row. But never here, where he risked it all.
Instead, he built his own modest memorial to his fallen comrades at home in suburban Lynchburg, Va., next to a lake he named his "English Channel."
There, amid green shrubs and red flowers, sits a rough-hewn stone with a bronze plaque. In small letters are the names of 113 men, all from Company B, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division. All died in World War II, many on D-day.
Sales calls it his Garden of Heroes.
But the tribute was not enough. He wanted to return to the place where those men became heroes, to the place where he lost his childhood and became, so suddenly, a man.
Omaha Beach.
'We thought we were super soldiers'
Bloody Omaha. Sales landed in the first wave in the Dog Green sector, a young rifleman who had never been in action.
He had been "a country boy running after women and drinking liquor." At 15, he enlisted in the National Guard for the dollar-a-day training pay and a little adventure. Then his unit was federalized into the 29th - the Blue and Gray division for its Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania members whose forbears fought on opposite sides in the Civil War.
Like so many others who saw battle for the first time on D-Day, "We thought we were super soldiers, that we'd be the winners who would go in there and just eat them Germans alive."
But that's not what happened. Of the 30 soldiers in Sales' landing craft, he was the only survivor.
"The killing there was unbelievable," he says. "We knew there'd be killing, but the magnitude of it was damn shocking."
As Sales walks the sands, he says his memories come to him in black and white; the colors lost in the smoke and heavy clouds of D-Day.
In his mind's eye, there will never be peace on Omaha Beach. Only "dead bodies rolling up. Hundreds of them."
Beneath a gray Normandy sky, he braces himself against the cold channel gusts. As then, his back is to the sea, his eyes locked upon the green craggy cliffs before him.
"Everything that killed people was up there," he points. "It's hard to believe there's nothing there now."
Not quite nothing. Modest, recently built vacation homes line the cliffs' base. Sales doesn't go along with veterans who complain that the houses sit on sacred ground.
"It's all right," he says. "It's another generation and another world."
'How close I came to being here'
The truly sacred ground here lies just above the cliffs at the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. Of the 9,386 soldiers buried beneath its marble crosses and stars, Bob Sales grew up and served with 20.
"How close I came to being here," says Sales, wounded three times in five months of combat, the last so serious it left him blind in one eye.
He walks to the cemetery's overlook with its commanding view of Omaha Beach. Even before he reaches it, he is struck by the pine trees planted all around - trees that are not native to this area.
"They thought of everything," says Sales of the cemetery's planners. "A lot of these boys come from the Virginia pines. A lot of them cut pines for a living."
He walks among the graves. "Seven, nine, 11, 13 . . ." Sales counts out as he searches for a friend.
"There he is," Sales says as he stops in front of Plot 1, Row 19, Section I. He reads the inscription, carved in military shorthand:
'They missed a helluva lot'
Capt. Robert Ware, Section G, Row 17, Plot 8.
The hometown battalion doctor treated Sales' injured knee after a training accident in England.
"He gave me a three-day pass to London," says Sales, gently touching the top of Ware's cross.
On D-Day, Ware volunteered to go in on an early wave, even though, as a doctor, he could have come in much later.
Sales watched from the water as Ware was hit, his helmet flying off his head to reveal a shock of bright red hair.
"That was a man bound to be a millionaire if he had lived," he says, holding back tears.
Sales also visits William Stedman, the good-hearted Lynchburg boy with no family who stood guard duty for Sales one time. He pays respects to Leonard Riley, a newlywed when he shipped off to England.
"They missed a helluva lot," says Sales, his words punctuated by a sorrow unrelieved by the years. "Fifty Christmases, 50 birthdays, 50 summers. . . .
"You have to feel a little bit guilty," says Sales, who late in life had a son, now 11. "I've had such a good life. It just points out how much a man gives up when he dies fighting a war."
But as he drives the countryside - "This is where I landed. . . . This is where I came up the Vierville draw" - Sales notices the fruits of D-Day, too. He admires the Norman farmers' fields, so straight and level.
"Last time was war. Things were torn up, there were holes in the fields, dead cows."
In St. Lo, "flat and rubble" after some of the fiercest fighting, "you can't even tell there was even a war there."
"France has done well with its economy," says Sales. "Makes you think you accomplished something here."
But Sales accomplished even more for himself.
"I'd guess there isn't anything ever bigger that happened to me," he says, gesturing to the beach around him. "I didn't become a congressman; I was not that big in life. Omaha Beach and France was the biggest thing I ever done.
"It didn't pay too well but it'll be remembered a lot longer. It's the only thing I ever done to put me in the history books."
And, having said that, Bob Sales heads off the beach one last time, a light rain softening the hard sand below his steps.
