‘I'm not the hero': At 99, one of America's few living D-Day vets would rather be fishing
How do you carry a shard of history everybody wants a glimpse of, a memory everyone craves?
Edward Sandy and his friend Spero Mihilas shared one such memory but bore it differently.
Friends since their Depression-era childhood in upstate New York, they enlisted together in the Navy in 1943, Sandy at just 17. A year later — June 6, 1944 — they found themselves on the same gunner boat off the coast of Normandy, France.
Shells exploded around them. Nazi gunfire pounded from the shoreline. It was D-Day, one of the 20th century's most famous battles, history's largest amphibious invasion. With an assault wave of 160,000 Allied soldiers, the Battle of Normandy has been memorialized in countless books and movies.
To the soldiers, it was a mess of sea spray, confusion and slaughter.
Theirs seemed a suicidal mission — the two friends and their crew were assigned to run a converted landing craft up and down the shoreline, their job to draw enemy fire away from troops making landfall. Mihilas would later recall their commanding officers 'informed us we'd be slaughtered."
But they survived unscathed. After the famous ground invasion broke through, marking the beginning of the end of the war, their role in the initial assault wave turned into a weeks-long rescue mission, one that left their decks drenched with the blood of wounded comrades they shuttled from shore.
In the decades to come the two men would remain friends, each finding their way in later years to Florida. But they would treat their shared experience differently.
Whereas Mihilas would aerate it with discussion and recollection, Sandy would keep it close, demurring on details, leaning into understatement.
'It didn't look too good, believe me,' he says now of the battlefield that day.
That reluctance held true even when he and his friend would meet, Sandy traveling north from his home in Lantana to visit his old friend, now deceased, in Winter Park.
'That's all he'd talk about would be the war,' Sandy recalls now. 'He'd say, 'Sandy, we were lucky.' '
D-DAY: Veteran lost leg but not spirit on fateful 1944 day
Lucky they certainly were. Sandy finished a three-year tour of duty, went home and started a life and family as nations rose and fell. Eighty-one years later, here he is on the cusp of a century of life, sitting in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Lantana waiting to place his order.
The 99-year-old can do fewer things these days. He loves fishing but his balance isn't what it once was. That and swollen feet make getting in and out of boats difficult. Mostly he and his son watch fishing shows on TV.
He doesn't talk much about the war now. Not that he ever did if he could avoid it.
'I don't know,' he says. 'It's just a feeling in me. I just don't like it.'
But you can get him talking about fishing. About the snakehead fish and clown knifefish he caught last summer on Lake Ida in Delray Beach, an increasingly rare boating excursion to celebrate his 99th birthday. His son thinks he may now hold the record of oldest person to catch each one.
Sandy's face brightens, too, when the conversation switches from war to what followed. When his three years in the Navy ended, he returned to his home in Amsterdam, New York, a small city 32 miles northwest of Albany.
D-DAY: Palm Beach County remembers
He doesn't hold back talking about how he met his wife, Barbara, now 90. It was a buddy who summoned him one day to come out and meet her.
'He says, 'Ed, you've got to come to the bowling alley,' " he recalls. " 'This girl, she's something. You gotta meet her.' '
'Boy, he was right,' he says. 'She was nice. And we hit it off together.'
WORLD WAR II: Christmas dinner 1943: WWII Navy vet cooked all night for 8,000 sailors ... 'A lot of guys weren't going to be around the next year'
They married in 1959 and honeymooned in Miami. Thirteen years and three kids later, they moved to Palm Beach County.
Sandy got a job with the county government's traffic engineering department, striping roadways. They bought a house with a pool on 57th Avenue in Greenacres.
'It worked out perfect,' he said. 'Everything just clicked just like that. So I figured we moved at the right time.'
He loved the warm weather, raised his family, retired from the county at 62 and never looked back.
A long, rich life followed, but memories of D-Day are always there.
D-DAY: The men on the beach remember
Yet those frightening days along the Normandy beaches are what people push for a glimpse of. Not just the names and dates — the sensations, that brush with the sweep of history.
It's not that he refuses to discuss it. In February he and the family drove down to Sunrise, where he was honored at a Florida Panthers hockey game.
The stadium played a prerecorded interview with him on the Jumbotron, where he gamely summarized his experience.
'We were on a gunboat. We were patrolling the shore,' he said in the video. 'I helped protect the men on the beach.'
'A bomb went over our bow and another bomb went over our stern,' he recalled. 'We were very lucky we didn't get hit.'
He brought down the house with his go-to line about confidence in victory that day: 'We knew we were going to do it. We're Americans.'
'I'm not the hero,' he was quick to add. 'The heroes are the ones that are left there.'
From a seat in the arena, he waved to acknowledge the crowd's applause, all smiles.
Sandy's son, Mark, a Navy veteran himself, said his father's reservedness is borne from his awareness that so many others paid such a steep price. It's estimated some 4,400 Allied soldiers died on D-Day, including 2,500 Americans.
'He's lucky that he's here, is the way that I think he looks at it,' he said. 'And he doesn't really want to talk about it because there were a lot of people lost during that time. He's just fortunate that he came back. And he's really humble about that.'
There are fewer and fewer World War II veterans still living. Of the 16 million Americans who served during the war, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated in January that just 66,000 were still alive.
Of the 73,000 American soldiers who fought in the Battle of Normandy, it's likely just a few hundred remain.
Sandy's 100th birthday comes in July. To celebrate, his son Mark hopes to take him out boating again.
If he can document his father catching another snakehead or clownknife fish, maybe he'll set a new record, on the day of his centennial no less.
Now that would be something to talk about.
Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Navy vet Edward Sandy, 99, of Lantana, survived D-Day
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