Gratitude Monday: On the beach

From terrorism in Tel Aviv to Orlando, it’s been an utter nightmare of a week. But On Saturday, between coverage of all this insanity, I listened to NPR’s Scott Simon interview Mortimer Caplin, who’s approaching his 100^th birthday. 

At age 27, Caplin was a US Navy beachmaster at Omaha Beach on D-Day. That means that he was one of the first to land, and—working amid body parts and the horribly wounded—he established and maintained communications with the naval armada and he directed the logistics on the beach. Listen to him talking about his responsibilities in that happy, matter-of-fact way. No braggadocio, no self promotion, just, “Yep, that’s what I had to do; that’s what I did.”

It’s a critical role for amphibious landings, the one that’s meant to bring order out of chaos, ensuring both thousands of men and tons of matériel got to where they could do the most good. And Omaha was the most chaotic of the five Allied landing beaches. It was the most challenging physically (beneath cliffs), and almost no troops came ashore at their designated targets. The consequences were brutal; there was one point when General Omar Bradley considered whether to withdraw the troops from Omaha because the cost was too high.

It’s hard for me to imagine a 27-year-old with that kind of responsibility under those circumstances. Partly because for the past ten years I’ve been working with a lot of 20-somethings whom I wouldn’t trust with anything more critical than managing code release. And partly because the image of a beachmaster has imprinted on my mind as that of Kenneth More playing Colin Maud, from the film of The Longest Day.

(The beachmaster sequence starts at 1:13 in this clip, following the bit with Peter Lawford as Lord Lovat landing with No. 4 Commando.)

(The Darryl F. Zanuck production yucks it up in this sequence. And it erroneously plants Maud at Sword Beach, instead of Juno, both British targets. But at the time of the invasion he was 41, and More did display the kind of gravitas that you’d expect in someone with that responsibility. The dog and the walking stick are well within the envelope of British military eccentricity. As is Lord Lovat’s piper. The schtick with Sean Connery—not so much.)

But Caplin wasn’t the youngest beachmaster in the US fleet. His comrade at another Omaha sector, Joe Vaghi, was 23. Vaghi, also a metro-DC resident, died in 2012 at age 92. Both returned from the carnage of D-Day and beyond. Vaghi was an architect; Caplin served as Commissioner of the IRS under JFK, and has been a supporter of the arts hereabouts for decades.

I refer you again to the NPR interview; listen to Caplin’s voice and consider how, before he was 30, his actions contributed to the life you lead today. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, and I’m extremely grateful to him. Not only because of his courage back then, but because he reminded me that, in this world of unspeakable viciousness, there were those who worked steadfastly in the worst of conditions in the hopes of building something better, something bigger than the next iOS app.

Let’s hope there are others like him now.