Very good speech. In fact, a great speech.
Toward the end he remarked that each grave has been adopted by a French family. When I took the tour at the time of the fiftieth, I was astonished. I had been to France before, but only to Paris. Parisians don't like Americans, and are generally very rude to anyone who doesn't speak French. It was very different in Normandy. It was 1994, and I had last studied French in 1963 -- 31 years before. My French was, shall we say, pretty bad. In Normandy that didn't matter. We on the tour were Americans, and the people of Normandy welcomed us. The fact that I even tried to speak French was accepted gratefully. They didn't ridicule me for it, they did their best to understand my fractured French. They remembered that thousands of Americans had sacrificed their lives to free Normandy and France from the Third Reich, and they were grateful.
