Hi,
My name is Matt McCoy. I am a second year history major at Ohio State. I am very excited for the upcoming World War Two study trip to Europe. Before the trip even starts for me, it begins. The trip gives me a great excuse to go to Ireland for a few days and explore. I have always wanted to go to Ireland, as it looks like a beautiful country and also because many of my ancestral roots dig into its soil. But, aside from a short trip to Ireland and the tea in London, the trip offers me much more. I am allowed the opportunity to stand on the same soil as American servicemen who crossed the Atlantic, and stormed the beaches, and kept moving east until the war was over. I am allowed to stand not only where they marched, and ran, dodging bullets and bombs, but where they died. And I get to experience that in a way that I do not think you ever could through the pages of a book in a faraway country. And there is so much more. American armies are not the only ones that stormed those shores and crossed a continent. And American armies are not the only ones I owe respect. Armies, of many nations, are also not the only thing that I will get to experience. I will be given the opportunity to breathe the air and traverse the ground of those doomed to die in a death camp in the East. I feel like they, too, deserve my understanding their plight just a little better, not that I could really ever understand it, than I could if I never walked where they walked. Wehrmacht soldiers also, those innocent men and women of a poisoned country who felt no fanatical adherence to Nazism, slave labor, and the gas chambers, seem like they should be understood better. They seem like they, too, those men who died shooting at an unknown enemy on the beaches of France, those families lost in the bombing of Germany, young and old, deserve it. World War Two was, and is, a powerful thing. So many who were in the war deserve, more than I could know, my understanding just a little more of how they lived, what they went through, and for too many, how they died. And I am very grateful that this trip will give me an opportunity to do just that.
And to end this first blog a little less solemnly, I am still also looking very much forward to that tea in London.