Seventy years after D-Day, Carl Proffitt Jr. can still remember the bodies of soldiers washing up on France's Omaha Beach in the Allied invasion that helped turn the tide against Nazi Germany in World War II.
One of the dwindling band of World War II veterans who gathered Friday at the National D-Day Memorial to mark the anniversary, Proffitt was in the first wave of infantry put ashore on Normandy's Omaha Beach in the teeth of German gunfire.
"If there was such a thing as hell on Earth, that was it," Proffitt, 95, of Charlottesville, Virginia, said. He still carries German mortar shrapnel in a leg.
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