VIERVILLE-SUR-MER, France – At Camp Dog Green, re-created just a few miles from where combat raged on and around the Normandy beaches in June 1944, soldiers in U.S. uniforms and nurses with the Red Cross insignia on their breast pockets mill among the green tents, tuning their tinny radios to the music of Glenn Miller. They appear to be just waiting for orders.
For these "troops," death is a remote idea: They are all re-enactors recreating the environment that surrounded D-Day. The goal, said Serge Balleux, the president of a Belgian association called Duty First, is to make the environment exactly like "what happened here 70 years ago."
John Trippon, 92, of Sun City West, Ariz., who served as a technical sergeant with what he referred to as the "landing craft infantry," walked through Camp Dog Green, hardly seeming to notice the re-enactors. In his mind's eye, he was once again a confused young soldier trying to make it to shore.
"What happened should have never happened to anybody," Trippon said. "I came in the second wave," he said.
The German fire was so relentless that rather than approach the shore, the boats dropped his unit in the sea, about 350 feet from land.
"And so we went down in the water," he said. "I had a Browning automatic rifle across my shoulders and bandoleers of ammo, hand grenades and a gas mask, and I had to get rid of all that otherwise I would be drowned. When I got on the shore, all I had left was my helmet and my gas mask, no gun.
"I picked up a gun off the beach because there were so many guys that had been killed so the guns were lying on the beach. And a friend of mine who was from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, hollered to me to come over and have shelter from the machine guns," he said, tears in his eyes.
"Of the 560 of us who landed that day, only 240 of us were alive," at the end of it, he said.
