Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 4, 1994 TAG: 9406060157
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, FRANCE LENGTH: Medium
The tears came anyway.
The feeling of loss rose to the surface as she tracked down Bedford Hoback's white marble cross among the 9,386 similar headstones overlooking the English Channel.
Boggess lost two brothers on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Bedford, who was 30, is buried here, only a few miles from the sand on which he died. The body of Boggess' other brother, 24-year-old Raymond, was never found. He may lie under one of the 307 headstones of the unknown dead resting here.
The Hoback family had the chance after the war to bring Bedford's body back to the United States. They decided to leave him in France with Raymond.
Boggess had visited the American-maintained cemetery at this bloodiest of D-Day beaches before. On Friday, she was accompanied by her son John, 36, a Washington, D.C., businessman, who was making his first trip to Normandy.
John remembered the room in his grandparents' home where his dead uncles' pictures and other belongings were kept, but he never heard much about Bedford and Raymond from his family. They didn't talk much about the men, and he didn't want to ask. "That would be too painful."
The Hobacks were the only family to lose two sons on D-Day.
"It seems like you're with them," Lucille Boggess said after stopping by Bedford's grave. "It seems they're so far away and you're with them."
If she could have Bedford and Raymond back, she would tell them how proud the family was of them, she said.
Standing at the edge of the cemetery at Colleville - where, 50 years ago, German defenders watched U.S. troops wade ashore hundreds of yards below - you got a sense of the treacherous task that faced the units of the U.S. 29th and 1st Infantry Divisions on D-Day.
After a brief stop at the cemetery, the veterans of the 29th that Boggess was traveling with mounted their bus caravan for a five-mile ride west to the other end of Omaha Beach. Here, Bedford and Raymond Hoback and other members of Company A of the 29th's 116th Infantry Regiment landed below the town of Vierville-sur-Mer and were all but annihilated by the cross fire of German machine guns and artillery.
The American veterans were met at the landing site by a company of French re-enactors dressed in period costume complete with leggings and World War II-era weapons and vehicles. Also waiting was an honor guard of soldiers from today's 29th Division Light Infantry- a National Guard outfit from Virginia and Maryland- and the division's band.
Chuck Neighbor of Roanoke landed in the first wave at Omaha with a company from Chase City. He watched the band with misty eyes as the memories of D-Day came flooding back.
When the division was training in England before D-Day, it was visited by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander for the invasion. When the troops marched past Ike, they broke out in song - "Roll Out the Barrel," a slap at the beer-loving Germans. Ike broke out in a large grin.
The veterans of the 29th seem to have the largest presence of any fighting unit here for the ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-Day. The veterans themselves attribute their camaraderie to the division's National Guard history.
At Vierville, the vets had the chance to walk on the beach on which many of their friends bled and died on June 6,1944. Some knelt to collect a bit of sand. John Hager of Fieldale, a former artilleryman, filled a discarded champagne bottle.
Hager's friend Glenwood Hankins, 71, of Martinsville, was watching nearby as the French re-enactors went through their paces.
Hankins returned to Normandy with mixed emotions. "I feel fortunate and thankful just to be here," he said, but there was sadness among the vets. "Everybody lost someone."
by CNB