I have never been one prone to "hero worship," that most common of passions. I enjoyed watching Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Bob Gibson play baseball. I was thrilled to see Jim Brown run over Sam Huff or Paul Horning run around him. I marveled at Cousy and Russell and the excellence of the Celtics. But these are not heroes. Heroes are made of sterner stuff.

History has called John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy "heroes." Undoubtedly, these men changed American society in many, many ways. Conversely, I do not use this name lightly. Martyrs, certainly. Heroes? Not in my mind.

In contemporary America, a land where heroes once walked among us, the tape measure used to judge the merits of what we consider heroic has shortened considerably. Even some of least among us, politicians, have been called "heroes" for "speaking out against [whatever]." Cindy Sheehan has been called - by some - a "hero" for her actions against the war in Iraq. Good Lord, even "The Dixie Chicks" were hailed by the dictionary-deprived as "heroes" for making disparaging comments about their country’s President while on foreign soil.

This day, like few others in history’s chronicle of time, gives us a reminder of the stuff that makes a true hero. This is one of those days that, like all days, comes around every year but its very sound makes me think of heroism. Every year, for over half a century now, I have tried to imagine what must have been going through the minds of those 155,000 soldiers as they approached their fateful destination. Some jumping from planes, some landing in gliders, most in tiny, wooden Henley boats.

They were 17, 18 or 20 years old, most fresh off their farms or urban neighborhoods. Most had never been more than 50 miles from their place of birth for all their short lives and here they were, facing a strange, new and distinctly hostile continent. Not a new frontier, opening its doors to welcomed guests but sailing into the teeth of the most fearsome fortress ever constructed by nature or man. For 3 years a patently evil and diabolical genius and his minions had been planning for their arrival. Planning and preparing for a thousand days. They had openly boasted that no invader could breech their defenses. These madmen had proven their expertise in dispensing death by developing and freely using strange new rocketry and explosives that had never been seen in warfare before. What could these same men have waiting for the young men in their frail landing boats? What rumors could their young, imaginative minds of those in the boats dream up as they roughly tossed toward the dark shore? Would the sand simply open up and swallow them? Were there trap doors constructed for them? Was the whole beach transformed into quicksand? But, yet, they kept coming.

When the doors dropped and the bullets flew toward them, what inside these men drove them forward? A rare few, I am sure, simply froze in horror. For others, forging on, it was simply that most primitive of instincts: survival. These heroes were not thinking of saving Europe at this instant or even their sweethearts waiting for them back home. They were thinking, one a more primal, gut-based level, "I want to live!" And, yet, they kept coming.

They watched their buddies and their fellow soldiers torn to shreds all around them. The man in front, the man to the side, another dropped in mid-step. They turned to glimpse over their shoulders and saw the plywood landing boats exploding from mortar shells behind them. New worries surfaced: "Would we be trapped here and never escape?" "How will I get rescued if I get shot?" Hundreds of yards of barren sand was all that stood between them and the enemy guns. Every angle from the concrete bunkers was covered and the only cover was behind a dismembered corpse of one of your own troops. But, still, they kept coming.

And, despite the odds, they succeeded. They did the impossible. Ten thousand died that day. Many, many more were changed - for the rest of their lives - by what they saw and heard. For me, that adds much to their ultimate appraisal. These are the same young men who, when freed from their awful trials in a terrible war, returned home. These men were not braggarts. They didn’t regal those back home with fables of their mighty conquests. Nor did they succumb to "post-traumatic stress disorder" and whimper off to psychiatrists or seek solace in the bottle or with a needle. Indeed, they were traumatized beyond human belief but they bore their pain and horrors with extraordinary courage and stoicism. They quietly set out to build America even stronger. They went to college in record numbers. Their sweat and toil forged a country whose justice and humanity are unmatched in the history of the world. They earned a moniker that no one dare question: "The Greatest Generation." These are my heroes. And they almost complete my list.

June 6^th, 1944 - a mere sixty-three years ago, stands as my measuring stick of heroism. Few since have dared measure up. Most that have tried are found to come up short of the standard.