“When I go to look at the beaches at Omaha, I remember all my friends that were killed there,” he said. During the 2019 trip, a French elementary school student asked him if he had nightmares about D-Day. Lambert made many trips to Normandy, visiting classrooms and posing for photos. He added, “My job now is to remember, not for my sake, but for the sake of others.” But I was always an ordinary man, not one who liked being at the head of a parade.” “As a combat medic, my job was to save people and to lead others who did the same. “I did what I was called to do,” he said in “Every Man a Hero,” a memoir, written with Jim DeFelice, published shortly before the 75th anniversary. But as he aged and more and more of his fellow veterans died, he said, he felt a sacred duty to share his story and theirs.
Lambert refused to talk about the horrors he had witnessed and experienced overseas. His brother Bill, also a medic, was with him.įor many years Mr. He was in the first wave of Allied forces as they crossed the English Channel and stormed German defenses strung along the coast of northern France, beginning the long offensive that would culminate in Germany’s defeat. He had taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and had already earned three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars before his war came to an end on the morning of June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach. Lambert was leading a unit of medics with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s First Division. Trump paid tribute to him.Ī native of Alabama, Staff Sgt. Lambert to the anniversary ceremony in June 2019 in France, where President Donald J. Ray Lambert, a much-decorated former Army medic who survived multiple wounds on D-Day in aiding his comrades and was saluted in Normandy on the 75th anniversary of that most pivotal battle of World War II, died on Friday at his home in Seven Lakes, N.C.
0 kommentar(er)
