Local students discuss upcoming trip to Normandy for 80th anniversary of D-Day
KINGSPORT, Tenn. (WJHL) – Ten local students from Sullivan County and Kingsport City Schools are headed to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy.
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Each student had to write a letter to a soldier who fought in World War II on D-Day. Some of them chose to write about their relatives who fought during the invasion.
“I wrote to my great-grandfather,” Eden Vineyard, a rising senior at West Ridge High School said. “So I wrote to him from my perspective, basically talking about how I really didn’t get to talk to him a whole lot about his experience because he really didn’t like sharing about it. But learning about it with my grandfather, it was just a really good experience to find out, like what he went through and just to be grateful for where my family is because of his sacrifice.”
Mark Sago, a recent graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School, said his great-grandfather was a combat engineer on the Invasion of Normandy at D-Day.
“My letter really was about expressing my thanks for him, for the risks he took and the sacrifices he’s made to serve our country and both the sacrifices he’s made also to our family,” Sago said. “And so I just was really appreciative of all the things he’s done.”
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Katelyn Shoemaker, a rising senior at West Ridge High School, said she feels strongly about how her great-grandfather survived the landing on D-Day. She found out he was a little older than most drafted soldiers, being in his mid-twenties.
“I think that’s why he actually made it through the landing because he saw people like obviously drowning because of the backpacks, not even being killed in the water they couldn’t swim to the shore because of the backpacks,” Shoemaker said. “So he took his off and that obviously had everything in it he needed. He had no weapon or anything but he took his off, so he could get to the shore and then took someone else’s that had already died. Which it was a really sad story, but that’s what he had to do.”
Some students decided to write about other soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy.
“I wrote about … a rifleman in the 26th regiment of the First Infantry,” Natalie Carr, a rising senior at Sullivan East High School said. “His name was Edward Duncan Cameron and I wasn’t related to him. But after doing a lot of research, I found him and I found letters that he had written to his family. So I decided to talk about his time as a rifleman storming the beaches of Normandy.”
Courtney Good, a rising senior at West Ridge High School, said she wrote about a soldier named Private Colton.
“I just was researching on veterans and he popped up and he seemed very interesting to me,” Good said. “And so I started to write about him.”
The students will get to meet veterans still living who fought on D-Day.
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Garrett Crowder, a recent graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School, will enter the Naval Academy just two weeks after the trip and is honored to get to meet these veterans.
“I think that meeting with these veterans and actually experiencing from them a little bit what D-Day was actually like, will possibly allow me to gain further appreciation to the challenges that I’ll be going through at the academy,” he said.
The students will get to visit Omaha Beach, one of the landing sites of D-Day.
Both Shoemaker and Vineyard said their great-grandfathers landed on Omaha Beach.
“I was hoping to bring maybe a photograph of him to take a picture with him on the beach and send it back home,” Shoemaker said.
Sago, Shoemaker, and Vineyard said all of their families were excited for them to win this competition to visit Normandy.
“They really egged me on to enter into the competition, so they were ecstatic when I’d finished and submitted my letter and they were able to read it,” Sago said. “Especially, my grandparents on my father’s side, which is where my great-grandfather who fought is from. They were just so, so happy for me.”
All of the students learned about D-Day in their history classes. Eric Rowe, history teacher from West Ridge and Josh French, history teacher at Dobyns-Bennett will be chaperoning on the trip.
“It’s an incredibly humbling experience, especially because there’s only a select few of us that were chosen from this country,” Carr said. “And I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to go and meet other kids from different countries and leaders. It’s just a great experience and it’s a real blessing.”
The students thanked their teachers, Eastman Chemical Company, Delta and representatives from Normandy for making this trip possible.
They depart for Normandy on Saturday, June 1 and will arrive back to the states on Friday, June 7.
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