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Weyrauch uses his left foot to prop open the screen, leaning against the doorjamb with his one good arm, talking to his visitor for only a moment. But by the time he shuts the door and returns to his living room, one beach has given way to another in his mind.
"They're moving to Normandy Beach," he tells his wife.
Mary Weyrauch tilts her head ever so slightly, registering her husband's mistake, correcting him without looking up from what she is doing. He is 82. She is 80. Theirs is a household in which the present yields easily to the names and places of the past. Particularly that name. Particularly that place.
Sixty years ago today, Ken Weyrauch was a young man sprawled beneath an overcast sky on a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. He could not move. He could not speak. His view, had he been able to raise his head, was of the 20th century arriving at one of its most monumental turning points.
On one side of him was a swath of rustic French farmland, honeycombed with overgrown hedgerows, swarming with thousands of soldiers. On the other was a beach where warships stretched across the horizon, and a rising tide left a crimson residue each time it lapped at the sand.
It was D-Day, June 6, 1944, the date of the daring Allied invasion, staged across 60 miles of Normandy coastline, that foretold the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II.
Weyrauch was a squad leader in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division: the Big Red One. His company -- "A" Company, 1st Battalion, 18th Regiment -- landed at dawn in the heart of the fight on Omaha Beach, where a combination of circumstances would pit the best German defenses against some of the most battle-hardened U.S. troops.
The Allies would win the day. But as dawn broke, and the invasion began, the dug-in defenders had a deadly advantage over the attackers, particularly at Omaha Beach. That three-mile stretch of Normandy coastline would see roughly 2,400 Allied dead and injured that day, according to historians at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
Weyrauch was severely injured by an artillery round that would cost him his left arm. For most of that day and all of that night, he lay among the dead, flickering in and out of consciousness, too severely injured to signal for help as medical corpsmen trudged by.
"They thought Ken was dead," he says. "But Ken wasn't dead."
LOVED A BRITISH NURSE
The Weyrauchs live in Ridge Manor, a small retirement community of narrow streets and immaculate one-story homes halfway between Orlando and Tampa.
Theirs was a wartime romance: He was the wounded American soldier; she the compassionate British nurse. But there were no tender bedside scenes. She never had the chance to nurse him back to health. They were separated for two years as he recuperated in military hospitals.
"It's hard to explain it to people these days," she says. "You couldn't just turn on a television and find out what happened. You couldn't just pick up a telephone and send a picture of yourself. You couldn't even make a long-distance call. It was too expensive."
So his proposal to her came in a letter dictated from his hospital bed. Her acceptance came in one of the many letters she sent back to him. And in 1946, she took the Queen Mary across the Atlantic to marry him, joining the horde of 30,000 young British "war brides" who came to the United States after the war.
Many of them would find disillusionment here, at least at first.
"We thought Americans were always living it up," she says. "In the movies we saw, it looked like all they did was go on holidays and drive around on Saturday night."
Instead, she found herself living in an apartment so spare -- with its derelict stove, its basement toilet and its trickling shower, shared with another set of boarders -- that she sat down on a chair in the doorway and sobbed when she first saw it. But they managed. He got a job that he would keep for 25 years, working for the Veterans Administration, helping other disabled veterans, first in Syracuse, N.Y., and then in Tampa. They had two sons. They remained active in veterans circles year after year, attending the annual Big Red One reunions and traveling to France for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, where they were showered with awards, souvenirs and gratitude by the people in the towns along the Normandy coast.
Their experience was somewhat different last week. They were invited to Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the new World War II memorial. The speeches were inspirational. But the scene at the airport was a familiar ordeal.
Ken Weyrauch's body is still riddled with D-Day shrapnel. As usual, it did him no good to explain that to airport security screeners. As usual, he was escorted to the side to take off his shoes and hold out his one good arm as he was screened with a hand-held metal detector. As usual, he was good-natured while Mary fumed as she sat and waited, surrounded by their belongings, angered at the injustice of it all: The poor man had survived one era's gantlet. Wasn't that enough?
DEFINING MOMENT
Like so many GIs who wound up on the D-Day beaches, Ken Weyrauch had a small-town, middle-class, blue-collar upbringing. He grew up in Liberty, N.Y., which gave him the raw material for a small joke he has been dusting off for more than half a century now: "I fought for Liberty in more ways than one."
He fought in a regiment that was involved in three amphibious invasions and some of the most brutal action of the war. The Big Red One met the Germans first in North Africa, then in Sicily. Then it returned to training bases in England to prepare for D-Day.
That was where the Weyrauchs met. She was a nurse who lived in the small coastal town of Weymouth, working for an ambulance service that tended to victims of German bombing runs. Later, she tended wounded soldiers at a British evacuation hospital.
Life in Weymouth meant growing accustomed to blackouts and air raids, which were so commonplace that one afternoon Mary and a friend ignored the warning sirens and slipped off to the beach instead of finding an air-raid shelter. They sat on a park bench and watched British Spitfires darting among German planes above the English Channel.
What she was witnessing was another defining 20th-century event: the Battle of Britain, a series of aerial clashes over several weeks. In the end the British fighter pilots staved off the Luftwaffe, saving England and inspiring one of Winston Churchill's better known oratorical turns: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
The social center of the town was the Regent Dance Hall, where British girls went to meet American soldiers who were, as the Brits put it, "overpaid, oversexed, and over here."
One night, ignoring the jitter-buggers on the dance floor, Mary found herself focusing on a lonely looking soldier who was sitting at its edge.
He told her he couldn't dance. She taught him how to waltz. They struck up a friendship that became a romance. Seven months later she found herself standing beside a road and waving as he and his company marched away to a secret location to prepare for a hush-hush operation.
When the Allies launched the biggest invasion in history a few days later, Weyrauch's company was at the heart of it.
They landed in the second wave, when the firing was still at its most intense. At Omaha Beach, unbeknownst to Allied intelligence, a fresh, veteran German infantry unit had been relocated to the bunkers a few days before. As the American soldiers piled out of their landing craft that day, they were subjected to such murderously efficient machine-gun fire that one survivor compared his dying comrades to corn cobs falling off a conveyor belt.
Weyrauch may have survived because his landing craft discharged its passengers slightly farther offshore. "They let us out on a sandbar," he remembers. "First, it was shallow. Then it got deeper, and we had to hold our rifles over our heads. All you could do was move forward. You had no choice."
He could see bodies and bombed-out vehicles on the beach. He could hear the piercing whine of artillery shells overhead. The water was so cold that it turned their feet blue. Their equipment was so heavy that many men simply sank and drowned. There were so many explosions that the beach itself was vibrating.
So many officers were killed on Omaha Beach that day that there was often no one left to give orders, and much of the Allied advance was made by men who simply chose to move forward on their own rather than wait for direction and die.
Somehow Weyrauch and most of his squad made it to the shelter of a sea wall, and from there up a ravine that cut through the bluff, following a taped pathway that scouts had laid out to help them avoid German mines.
Then, as he turned back to help other squads up the slope, an artillery shell -- Weyrauch thinks it was a German round that was meant for the beach but fell short -- killed several soldiers in his squad and knocked him unconscious. He lay there throughout the rest of the day and into the night.
Then daylight broke. He heard someone passing near.
"I still couldn't talk," he says. "All I could do was make a noise, like this, from the back of my throat."
He leans forward, crossing his right arm across his chest to grasp his empty left sleeve. His Purple Heart and Bronze Star lie in their cases on the coffee table in front of him. Nearby are two sepia, 1940s photographs, both of them glamorous, in their own way: him in his uniform, with a dreamy, romantic smile, and her in a pleated skirt and cardigan sweater, her hair in a Betty Grable wave.
Now Mary Weyrauch sits next to her husband, studying her hands, poised to correct him if he repeats himself or becomes confused. A year ago he was diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Her time to nurse him, after all these years, has finally come to pass.
His ailment, along with the passage of time, has blurred much of the past for him. But Ken Weyrauch has no difficulty recalling the moment he searches for now. It is as if it has been stored in his body, rather than in his mind. He leans forward on his couch, contorts his face, and summons, from across the years, the wordless sound he made that June morning to mark himself as one of the living.
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