Ed Morrissette squinted through misty morning fog at the French coastline toward a beach code-named Omaha. The 20-year-old soldier with the storied 1st Infantry Division had endured a rough ride across the English Channel in a wind-whipped ship. Now, as June 6, 1944, dawned — D-Day — a sailor released the front door of his landing craft.
Morrissette and another soldier dropped side-by-side into the neck deep surf. Along with their rifles, together they held aloft a large roll of communications wire. But the wire roll made a fat target for well-placed German machine-gun fire, which spattered in the water all around them.
They quickly dropped it and made for the beach. Morrissette waded past the bodies of dead Americans, floating in the waves. "I could not take the time to stop and ponder what was happening," he wrote years later in an account of his wartime service.
"My main goal was to get up on that beach in one piece and join up with my company." Morrissette, of Papillion, survived D-Day, and 11 more months of combat before World War II ended in Europe. He lived another eight decades before his death June 24, and less than a month after the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
He was 100. Guillaume Lacroix, the French consul general in Chicago, praised Morrissette as a "true hero" in 2019 in presenting him with the French Legion of Honor, the nation's highest military and civilian award, at a cemetery in the Elkhorn area. "The debt we owe you, the 'Greatest Generation,' is a debt.