Thank you, Grandpa

From their final resting place, you can see the waves of the English Channel softly break onto the shores. There, over 70 years ago the invasion of Normandy and the decisive campaign to liberate Europe began. There, men many as old as we are defined a generation of Americans and forged a new world order. There, this past week I stood and looked out upon those hallowed shores struggling to figure out where in this great lineage we will come to be remembered.

When I got back to our hotel that night, I called my grandpa, Anthony Liberto, back in Connecticut. He’s 91 now, but back on D-Day he was my age serving in the Pacific Theater aboard a Motor Torpedo boat (PT boat for short). After the war, grandpa became a crane operator in Connecticut working multiple jobs to keep his family in the two-family house that he still calls home. He never says much—that’s part of his nature—but as his only grandson and one who shares both a birthday and part of my actual first name, we have a unique relationship.

Back in high school, I was the first family member that he spoke to about his service in World War II. Sharing the lighter stories mixed with the loss of comrades and the intensity of battle, I glimpsed for a moment how those experiences shaped him into the person he would become, how that resilience would give me the opportunity to be where I am now.

Today, around the same age as he was then, I spend my days writing papers and pursuing a variety of scholastic endeavors. When I think about the sacrifice he and countless others made, I wonder what these days spent at Duke will mean for me if God grants me the same number of years as him. When we take a second to reflect, Duke’s environment prompts a level of selfishness and self-gratified achievement that is distressing juxtaposed with his generation of women and men.

While the worries of an individual exam carry a real level of stress and pressure, we can easily get far too caught up in their minutia losing the perspective that can guide our lives to the future. Living with purpose requires a calling or a direction, the kind of thing that reminds me what I work for and where I’m going even when the road gets bumpy and diversions delay or change my path. I’ve spent much of this semester wondering where I am headed, seeking a clear direction that has yet to reveal itself. That moment in 1944 seemed to possess a clarity of spirit and direction that we have scarcely been able to capture since.

Yet when I talked to grandpa, I remembered. That clarity is just a façade of hindsight for many who lived through it. The reason the war and subsequent years came to define his generation is because they faced a moment with an uncertain future and persevered through it. This feeling of ambiguity that many of us share right now facing a rapidly changing world then doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, it feels necessary for our development into the kind of people who can and will redefine this nation and this world again.

The memories of the greatest generation have been etched into the fabric of the American identity. As time continues to pass, however, that memory is becoming just that, a thing of the past no longer alive for us to experience. America was not perfect then, nor is it now. We only need to connect the dots of overt state force from mass incarceration to Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps. But there is something to be said about the sacrifices individual people made around the world to contribute to a war effort that defined our identity as a nation on the global stage. If all that I can say in the future is that I sought the most prestigious job, then perhaps I’ve failed that history, what has become my history. But if I can say that I sought to do what I thought was right when I was presented with an opportunity or a decision, then perhaps just maybe I can rekindle the spirit I still see in grandpa today.

I’ve felt an obligation returning to school this week to live up to the example set before us. As I looked over the American cemetery at Omaha Beach and wandered past the final resting place of thousands of Americans, I thought about the torch we are beginning to carry. When grandpa picked up the phone, those thoughts whirled in my head.