By Jay Jamison
I never met Kenneth Brinker, I never met his family and, in fact, I don’t know anyone with that last name. Yet, I know something about this man. He died 80 years ago this week in Normandy, France. I know this because his was the first grave marker, out of 9,387 others that I encountered in the American Cemetery just above Omaha Beach in Normandy, France back in 2004.
It just so happens that Private Brinker was from Illinois, as part of the 26th Infantry Regiment, of the 1st Division, U.S. Army. He didn’t die on D-Day, but died on June 9, 1944, somewhere ashore in Normandy. How old was he? The marker doesn’t say. I’m guessing that as an army private he was quite young, maybe in his teens or at least in his twenties. Had he survived the war, he may have lived a long and rewarding life, maybe even living into old age. The might-have-been accounts about Private Brinker along with those of the other 141,000 Americans soldiers who did not come home from the European war, are hard to imagine. Add to that number the over 42,000 airmen and sailors who did not return. Yet Private Brinker did land and die in Normandy, and there he remains.
Eighty years ago, there was no guarantee that the Normandy invasion would succeed. All the commanders and the planners of the operation are now dead, many having left behind their written accounts of the war. Private Brinker may have left a diary somewhere or some other account of his experiences, but for the last twenty years all I had were the cryptic words on his simple white marker.
Private Brinker made it ashore. He may even have made it inland before his death, or he may have been wounded on or near the beach, succumbing to his injuries days later. All I knew for the last 20 years was that Kenneth Brinker was there when the 26 Infantry Regiment went ashore.
Days before I filed this column, I learned more about Kenneth Brinker. I consulted an internet site called Find-a-Grave. I entered the information from Brinker’s Normandy marker and found out that he was born on March 21, 1925, in Forrest, Illinois. He was 19 years old when he died.
You may ask why I’m concentrating on a lone infantryman, when the story of the D-Day assault involved tens of thousands of men? The answer is simple: What little I’ve been able to put together about Private Brinker gives us a tiny glimpse into a young man’s brief life. Multiply that narrative by the over 9,000 grave markers in the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, and the heartbreaking magnitude of the Normandy landings becomes apparent. The grave markers in the American Cemetery are lined up in perfect order and they all look the same, like toys soldiers. But these men were not identical toy soldiers. They each had unique lives, and separate stories to tell, and families who may still grieve before stark white markers in a foreign land.
My choosing to write about Private Brinker was random. I just happened to come across his marker first. Many battle accounts that I’ve read, often allude to the terrifying randomness of death in combat. When planners and commanders evaluate the casualty estimates of a coming operation, they usually don’t attach life stories to the grisly numbers; that’s left for us to do, often years after the fact.
