The Final Salute: National D-Day Memorial June 4-9, 2019 - 14

BY NORMA LUGAR

THE HEART AND SOUL OF

BOB SLAUGHTER
The father of the Memorial said a few years before he
passed away in 2012 at the age of 87 that he hoped he'd
"given more than I've gotten." And he did. It's called the
The teen soldier was 15
when he joined the
National Guard, 16 when
he enlisted in the Army
and 17 when he shipped
overseas.

National D-Day Memorial.

t 16, he was a baby-faced GI who

thought war was like the movies:
"Where good guys win. Bad guys
lose. And we'd all come home and start our
lives." But one fall day in 1942, he watched his
transport, The Queen Mary, slice an escort ship
in two, killing 332 men while a young sailor frantically performed semaphore signals until the
sea swallowed him alive. It was the first of the
unforgettable images that haunted the man who
brought immortality to the heroes of the greatest battle America ever fought.
He remembered, for all his life.
The nightmares.
The faces ... always the faces.
Bob Slaughter was only 19 on that terrible day,
June 6, 1944. A long, tall 6'5'' sergeant and squad
leader in D Company, 116th Regiment of the 29th
Division and green as the Roanoke Valley he came

from, he was one of 30 men riding a bucking,
bouncing landing craft onto the shore of a French
beach he'd never heard of until five days before.
It was an awful ride. Huge waves. Freezing
water. And here he was, still far from shore, cold,
wet and vomiting into his helmet the remains of
the greasy meat and gravy he'd eaten at 2 a.m.
Let's join together,
There's a job to be done.
They'll pay you $30
And give you a gun...
(From his memoirs)
"We were all sick, wet, miserable, bailing with
our helmets, deaf from the guns, chilled from
the wind and all I could think was, 'Just get us in
there. Nothing could be worse than this,'" he said
in 2002. "Of course, I was very, very wrong."

The NighTmare BegiNs

ABOUT THIS STORY
This loving tribute to the late founder of the National D-Day
Memorial is excerpted from a 2002 article in The Roanoker
magazine. Its passionate author, Norma Lugar, won countless local,
regional and national awards for her writing, at both The Roanoke
Times and The Roanoker. Norma Lugar passed away in 2010, at the
age of 76.

THE FINAL SALUTE

Something was seriously amiss.
And really, really bad.
This was supposed to be an easy take ... a
nearly unguarded beach defended only by conscripted POWs at one or two of the 22 bunkers,
men who were supposed to surrender at first sign
of trouble. No one knew they'd been replaced by
Germany's crack 352nd Infantry Division,
sharp-shooters who, in this first light, were spraying death on approaching boats at Omaha Beach.
It was a massacre.

The Final Salute: National D-Day Memorial June 4-9, 2019

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