Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [25]
Since this was days before we were to commence filming, and we were in lo-fi mode, there was time for us to linger. I watched the two old Rangers drift off, one limping so badly that his wife was near tears with worry, the other tough and fit enough at seventy-five to easily kick all of our asses. They pointed out landmarks to each other. An observation bunker. A bomb crater. A gap in the hedgerows behind the guns. Then both gestured past the cliffs to a point far out in the English Channel.
At the base of the cliffs I found another one of our veterans looking out at the channel. He was a small, quiet man in his mid-seventies. His right shirtsleeve was pinned to his side, customized because his right arm had been amputated just above the elbow on June 6, 1944. Unlike the more animated Rangers, who had previously returned to Normandy several times and had formed a sort of collective narrative of their heroics for historians and spoke of the days that followed in terms of D-day Plus One (June 7), and so on, he was making just his second trip to Normandy. The first had barely lasted a day.
After some small talk, he pointed to where his sensibly shod feet were presently touching the beach and told me that this was exactly where it happened. He was a navy frogman (a precursor to today’s Navy SEALs) on D-day who had come ashore in darkness, before the Rangers, long before the rest of the invasion. His job was to quietly emerge from the water and blow up beach obstacles—barbed wire, steel crosses or “hedgehogs,” and Belgian gates—to clear the way for infantrymen, tanks, and other vehicles.
He told me that soon after he had detonated his first explosive, a Bangalore torpedo, German machine-gun bullets tore through his right arm. As more guns bore down on him, helpless and almost alone with the sun not yet risen, he crawled to one of the obstacles he was to destroy and sat with his back to the German army, facing the sea as the greatest naval invasion of all time revealed itself with the dawn.
“All I could see were ships, ships, ships,” he told me (and later said the same thing on film for our commercial). “I sat there for hours, crying and watching our soldiers land, and so many got shot down. At some point someone must have come up and tied a tourniquet around my arm. I really don’t remember, but I imagine that saved my life.”
He was the same age that Francis Wayland Ayer had been when he started America’s first advertising agency: nineteen.
Our final stop on the most profound location scout of my life was at the U.S. military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, whose entrance sits on a cliff overlooking the left flank of Omaha Beach. I had seen plenty of pictures of the cemetery, the seemingly endless rows of white crosses, and I had tried to prepare myself for the experience. Nearly ten thousand American soldiers, most of whom had died within a week of June 6 fifty years earlier, are buried here. I was prepared for the eerie symmetry of the crosses. And I knew enough to look away with the rest of the crew while our paratrooper friend and his wife were taken to the grave of his brother for the first time. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to see so many members of our crew—from twenty-year-old production assistants to hardened account execs—wiping tears from their eyes.
Not a day went by in advertising when I didn’t question some aspect of my job, but on this day it was hard to find fault with any of it. Even if this commercial turned out to be a disaster and never made it onto the air, it would be an undeniable success. It changed my life, and I’d like to think it made the lives of the men we brought there somewhat easier to bear.
That afternoon was unforgettable.
But that night was just plain freaky.
The Longest Night
How did the most profound and moving experience in my