| Commentary
|
| Filmmaker looking for D-Day vets |
| By Gary Nelson, Tribune Columnist |
| Larry Cappetto wants to know what you were
thinking on the boats. Cappetto is an independent video producer from Colorado, and he will be in town next month, and if you were on the boats he would like to talk to you. |
| There can’t be many of you left, you men who
were on the boats that hit the beaches of Normandy and Tarawa and all
the bloody places like them six decades ago. If you are one of them,
Cappetto would like to talk to you and maybe include you in a film he is
planning to make about D-Day. He wants to make this film before all of you slip away. And it is hard to say this, but too many of you are slipping away too fast. Every day in the obituaries we see the World War II generation slipping away, too many memories unrecorded, too many thoughts unuttered. Cappetto is only 45, too young to have seen the war, but he wants to talk to you because he wants to know what it was like in the boats. By that he means the Higgins boats, the LCVPs as they were called, which stands for "Landing craft, vehicle and personnel." They were the boats Eisenhower said won the war for the Allies, carrying young men packed like sardines to the beaches of France and across the Pacific. Cappetto is a jack-of-all trades video maker who usually pays the bills by taping weddings and such, but who hopes his D-Day documentary might be good enough for a spot on PBS. "What I really want to focus on is the soldiers and thoughts that were going through their minds, what it would have been like being on those boats," Cappetto said. If you were on one of those boats, you can call Cappetto toll-free at (888) 820-6366. If you have a computer and want to confirm Cappetto’s existence, you can check out www.larrycappetto.com. He will be in the Valley in late March, and if after 60 years you can tell him what it was like on those boats as you bore down on the guns of the Germans and the Japanese, as you bobbed in the waves and maybe lost your breakfast from dread or composed in your mind the first letter home you would write after hitting the beach, he wants to hear from you. "I owe a debt to those people," Cappetto said. "I really want to put together something out of respect and honor to these people and that I can share with the current generation." If you were scared on the boat it is OK to tell Cappetto about that. If you were resolved and fearless, you can say that, too. But it had to be hard, bobbing along in those wooden boats, because what waited for you on the sand was lead and steel and fire. It had to be hard, because this is what Ernie Pyle saw on Omaha Beach the day after the little boats had landed: "Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water for they were dead. The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. "In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good luck emblem. Sure. Hell, yes." |
| Contact Gary Nelson by email, or phone (480) 898-6541 |
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