While Andy Rollheiser’s classmates were attending 4th grade classes at Camdenton’s Hawthorne Elementary School, he was taking part in an academic lesson of a different sort at the American Military Cemetery in Normandy, France.
On a trip with his father and grandparents to visit family in France last month, Rollheiser visited the Eiffel Tower, rode on the Metro to the Champs Elysses where the Arc de Triumph was aglow with lights.
He visited the Notre Dame Cathedral, where he attended mass, took a tour of the Louvre and waited in the drizzle for a chance to see the Mona Lisa and Venus De Milo.
Rollheiser thought it was weird to see a dummy hanging from a parachute at the LeMere Eglise where the film “The Longest Day” was based. The paratrooper (a dummy of course) was hanging from the church steeple and there were beautiful stained glass windows in honor of what the Americans had done.
At Mont St. Michel, he learned it had originally been built as a fortress, then became a prison, then a monastery. At high tide, it is completely surrounded by the English Channel with only one road in or out. It was, without a doubt, the biggest structure Rollheiser had ever seen.
During a trek to Megaliths in Brittany he walked among the large rocks that were assembled for religious and burial ceremonies, said to be the oldest in the world and date to 3,000 B.C.
But it was the day he went to visit Omaha Beach that was the most memorable. It was the day that an American boy stood in awe, when the history lessons came to life.
“We wanted to see Omaha Beach and the German bunkers at Ponte du Hoc. You can actually go down in them. There are craters where the Americans sent fire power in to mow the Germans down,” he said. “I even climbed down in some of the bomb craters and into some of the concrete bunkers. Then we drove through small villages along the coast past Utah Beach and on to the American Cemetery.”
In the words of the 4th grader, what happened next was indescribable.
As Rollheiser and his dad, Matt, along with his grandparents, Leon and Ann Wahlbrink, walked in, a superintendent at the cemetery approached them.
“He asked if we would like to lower the American flag at sundown. What an honor that was. We spent a long time there and saw the graves of Teddy Roosevelt’s two sons,” he said. “Also the Nylan graves that were the basis for the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. There is no way to describe the sight.”
According to Wahlbrink, the superintendent explained that when it comes to lowering, folding and presenting the flag at sundown, it is preferred to have Americans take part in the ceremony.
For Rollheiser it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was a pretty big deal for a kid from the Lake of the Ozarks and one, he says, he will never forget.
