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D-Day 60 Years Later: Saving Private Riley
The New York Post, June 6, 2004
by Jonathan Foreman in France
The stirring emotions I felt watching "Saving Private Ryan" a few years ago were magnified tenfold this weekend as a million visitors flocked to Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
But the massive crowds are but a subplot to the real story here:
The hundreds of grand old men festooned in badges and berets, who were once the young men who took part in the greatest amphibious landing in history, and who began the liberation of France from Nazi tyranny.
Huston Riley, 84, of Washington, looked like all the other veterans on the train to Caen.
But his part in D-Day happens to have been immortalized by the great battle photographer Robert Capa, who hit the beach with the troops. Wounded shortly after the photo, he was rescued from the waves by two other GIs.
Riley was then a private in E Company, 2d Battalion, 16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, (The Big Red One). He landed on bloody Omaha beach at 6:30 a.m.
"I was in the first wave - and I was one of the lucky ones," he said.
And you looking at Capa's photo, you can easily see that it is indeed Riley struggling through the neck high surf when he was just 24 years old.
The first terrifying 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" were inspired by the Capa photos, and Riley said that that part of the Spielberg film is accurate enough, except for one thing.
"They got across that beach a hell of a lot faster than I did!" he recalled.
"It was utter confusion. You were swimming through bodies, and you figured it was only a matter of time."
Riley found himself being dragged down by his equipment, and as he inflated his life jackets, he felt two bullets ripping through his body.
"I was hit in the neck and shoulder, and I was dragged out by a buck sergeant and a man with a correspondent badge and a camera," he said.
He was evacuated back to England, but only months later he was back on the front line, fighting in and around Aachen, Germany.
He was wounded a second time, this time more seriously, bringing his own service to his country to an end.
Riley was already an experienced combat veteran when he went through the hell of bloody Omaha.
A volunteer in 1940, He'd fought with his regiment in North Africa and in Sicily.
Riley plans to visit to the great American cemetery at Colleville.
"There's a lot of guys I know in that graveyard who I went through Africa and Sicily with," he said.