Spectators gather as the USS LST 325 prepares to dock at Ross's Landing in this file photo.Put yourself in the place of an enlisted man - one of some 300 - in the bowels of USS LST 325 as it moves slowly across the English Channel from England to France on June 6, 1944. In your canvas rack, four high and 24 per compartment, you ponder your life. It is hot, and the sweat from the heat and the anxiety of your fellow soldiers permeates the area.
Many men in LSTs ahead of yours have been killed once they came ashore on their Higgins boats. The brass doesn't tell you that, but you know it instinctively. It's a suicide mission you're going into, one where German guns will be trained on you before and after you reach your assigned Normandy beach. This berth, with 15 to 18 inches between you and the man above you, may be the last place you call home.
The last operational Landing Ship, Tank from World War II -- LST 325 -- is docked at Ross's Landing through Wednesday. To tour it is to put yourself in the place of those brave troops who were needed to secure a beachhead in France on that gray June day and to be a part of the effort to save a continent from Nazism.
One man stepping into a troop berthing compartment on the ship Friday spoke for today's pampered American -- but may have spoken for those aboard the ship on D-Day -- when he said you'd "be better off in jail" than in the confined sleeping space.
And while we look back now, and see World War II as "The Good War," few soldiers on LST 325 that day probably saw much good about their situation.
Along with you aboard the 4,800-ton craft, in addition to your fellow soldiers, are 20 Sherman tanks (30 tons each) and 20 or 30 wheeled vehicles (Jeeps or otherwise). And it's hot below the main deck, and even hotter in the main engine room as far down as you can go.
On the main deck is an elevator to bring equipment up and down. This will be in use after you and your fellow soldiers leave LST 325 on your Higgins boat about 10 miles out and secure the beach. Then the LST itself actually will beach, open its wide mouth, let down its ramp and disgorge its equipment.
Also there are six 40 mm guns to help keep you safe, should the LST have to beach before the area is secure. They can fire two miles straight ahead to a land target or four miles with lobbed ammunition. Each gun has a trainer, a pointer, a first loader and two second loaders. You are confident your shipmates have this process down to a science.
Your particular LST even has an incredible Brodie landing system in which light airplanes can land with an overhead hook that catches on a sling hung on a crane and attached to a cable.
This last-of-an-era ship is nearly 328 feet long and 50 feet wide at the beam. To see it moored at Ross's Landing, its stark gray color punctuated by anachronistic DayGlo orange cones on deck, is one thing; to imagine hundreds of them coming across the channel loaded with men and equipment is to have a tiny picture of D-Day's Operation Overlord.
The first cross-channel trip for LST 325, which arrived in France late on D-Day or in the early morning hours of the next day, was one of 43 such trips it made.
On Friday, the LST was a swarm of people, ranging from those in the Greatest Generation who might have served on an LST to children whose lives haven't spanned the country's current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If there is something nostalgic about the ship to adults, it's understandable. It was first utilized in a war in which the enemy was clearly defined and had attacked the United States, in which its citizens understood and sacrificed for its execution, and which ended within five years after the country's entrance into it.
Today, unless we have a relative serving, there's only a hazy connection between each one of us and the wars in which our armies fight in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Many of us don't know why we're there, don't care to know and have no intention of sacrificing anything. If there's any artifact we'll be examining from these wars in 70 years, it may be a drone.
Taking a walk back in time on the LST is not glorifying war, but it does help recall a time when such an undertaking was appreciated and shared in by the majority of people in the country.