Julie will be in Paris, France until Dec. 17.

Yesterday, I was in America for an hour and a half.

There were no Targets. No 7-Elevens. No pumpkin spice lattes (despite the wishes of many of my fellow students).

The Normandy American Cemetery lands, overlooking Omaha beach, were given to the United States by France as a gift and are technically U.S. soil. There was a picture of Obama hanging behind the information desk, American flags flew over the graves and everything written first in English and then French.

Ironically, the lady at the front desk thought we were French and directed us toward the French brochures.

The people from my program started splitting off into small factions at this point and silently going to explore the beach and cemetery.

Walking down Omaha Beach was completely surreal, especially since we had been watching archived footage of the débarquement all weekend. And unlike Glory Beach, where our hotel was the night before, there were no rusting remains to hint that this had ever been anything more than the pristine coastline before me, laden with shells and clear blue waters that left wrinkles in the sand at low tide.

I took a rock from the beach. It was smooth and fit perfectly in the middle of my palm.

Climbing back up the stairs from the beach left me very winded, although not as much as seeing the cemetery. My first thought was that it was much bigger than I expected. Then my friend reminded me that I was only currently looking at two of the six plots.

I separated from the group then because there are some things that need to be done alone. I walked among the white crosses (and occasional Star of David), which were so white they almost looked plastic. But when I ran my fingers along one, it was colder than I imagined. Some graves had wilting roses laid on the ground in front of them, others had tiny American flags. I scanned the rows of names I didn’t know, feeling both more and less than I should.

But nothing hit me as hard as the first cross I stumbled upon which read:

“Here lies in honored glory a comrade in arms known only to God.”

Photo by the author.

I began seeking out more crosses like this, moving towards the back of the plot which was probably visited less often. I found one with a rose lying face down and off to the side of it. I picked it up and laid it down face up.

I knelt down in front of the cross and wondered about the person under it. Why didn’t they know who he was? What if he was the guy from the video whose face got blown in and everyone who he knew was killed?

Maybe he lied about his name and age when he enlisted because he was too young to join the army. Maybe his best friend from home was a pacifist who begged him not to go, but he did anyway because he knew in his heart it was what he had to do. Maybe he loved a girl and wrote her letters promising to marry her when he came home. Maybe he had kids who dressed up in soldiers’ uniforms and pretended to be like Daddy. Maybe his parents were just told he was missing and they kept his room ready for him in case he came home. But he never did.

All the unrealized possibilities of this one grave piled up on me and when I looked out at the cold uniformity of the hundreds of crosses, a little bit of possibility leaked out my eyes.

This soldier, whoever he was, nobody ever came specifically to visit him. And so I decided that I did. That all the love and sadness and patriotism I’d felt on this trip was for him. And hopefully that counted for something. After all, he could be related to me. Or he could’ve known someone related to me. Or he could’ve been just one guy who gave up everything for 60 million Frenchmen he didn’t even know.

It was almost time to go. But I hadn’t brought a flower and I didn’t want to leave without giving him something. I realized vaguely that maybe I was being theatrical or making too big a deal out of this, but it still felt important somehow.

I could leave him my rock, but I didn’t think he’d want a piece of the beach where he died. So I took my notebook out of my bag. I opened it to a blank page, but I didn’t know how to say everything. So I just wrote “thank you,” ripped out the page, folded it up and tucked it snugly between the grave and the grass.

Then I walked back to the bus and left America.

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