Remembering the storming of Omaha Beach
From Brian Todd
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Nathan Reed, a frail 86-year-old man who now wears gloves to protect his hands from hot coffee cups, may be one of the bravest souls you'll ever meet.
He wheels around the Armed Forces Retirement Home. He is one of few remaining who can recall when that first wave hit Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
Reed and his fellow Army Rangers were given perhaps the most daunting orders ever issued to an invasion force: Scale those cliffs, take them and hold them -- all while you're raked by German artillery and machine gun fire.
"We had an awful lot of soldiers that was killed outright," says Reed.
Pvt. Reed came close to being killed. At the foot of a cliff, holding a rope as his sergeant climbed, a grenade dropped down and exploded at his knees.
"It punctured my ear drums, broke this knee up," he recounts.
The Rangers kept climbing up the cliffs, except for Reed.
"I layed there on the beach for two days and nights without food or water. Aid man came by and looked me over for bleeding and so forth. After the late evening of the second day, some young German prisoners carried me down and put me on a boat and I went to the Battleship Texas," he remembers.
Reed received his Purple Heart and Distinguished Unit Badge, but spent three years in military hospitals before being discharged. And he still carries the wounds from 60 years ago.
But he thinks of others, who can't see so well, and calls out their elevators for them at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.
Reed counts himself among the lucky ones, making it off that beach outside a body bag -- luckier than the Allied soldiers who died.
"I'm just glad to be alive," he says. "So many that got killed, 'round near me. It gets to you."
