Among the great turning points in human history, few rival D-Day. Name one other event with that many dimensions, or with that much peril foreshadowed in failure.

Though I was born six years after this epic event, its telling and retelling never grew old for kids in my neighborhood. It seemed like the dust and smoke of battle were still clearing when we were kids, and the Marshall Plan was still rebuilding Europe. It was our fathers and uncles who stormed those beaches and jumped from those planes, and when they were ready to talk about it years later, when the horror had faded sufficiently to let them hazard a look back, the stories they told around the family dinner table became our shared history. Hollywood stepped up and did its part to underscore that ownership by association. Aside from Playboy magazine, nothing was more enthralling to boys my age than seeing John Wayne wading ashore at Omaha beach through the storm of lead, defying death and the forces of evil with righteous determination and unworldly calm. And the best place to see it was at the drive-in.

Good or bad, like it or not, the world was a different place back then. At the beginning of the war, the average guy living in the average American community knew a world captured in Norman Rockwell paintings. Daily life was simpler, more decent, less expensive, and a lot slower than it is now, and for none of us was that truer in 1941 than for tens of thousands of Native American men and women who enlisted in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor. Either then or now, few Americans could imagine the journey Donald Goodbird made from his home village of Independence, on the upper Missouri River, to the beaches of Normandy.

Goodbird was in his early 20s at the start of the war, and like most members of the Three Affiliated Tribes in central North Dakota (the same folks who took care of Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804-05), Goodbird came from a clan of successful ranchers. Over the next three years, about 300 of his fellow tribal members, out of a total population of 2000, enlisted in the armed forces. When the day came to go off to war, Goodbird saddled up his favorite horse, said goodbye to all his clan relations in their native Hidatsa, and rode off down the river and over the hills toward the town of Elbowoods, the agency headquarters. Once there, he left his horse at Martin Cross’ place and caught a ride on the mail truck to Garrison. From Garrison, Goodbird rode a bus to the enlistment center in Fargo, 200 miles further east, and vanished into the war. Then late one afternoon in September of 1945, the same Donald Goodbird hopped off the back of the mail truck at the post office in Elbowoods, shouldered his duffle bag, and set off up the dirt road toward Martin Cross’s house where he’d left his horse. After a home cooked meal in Dorothy Cross’s kitchen, Goodbird saddled his horse and rode off up the river toward Independence, retracing the tracks he’d made four years before.

“That’s the way a lot of our guys came home,” remembers Crusoe Cross, who was a boy of 15 at war’s end. “They came walking in over the hills, or down Old State Road Number Eight, with a duffel bags on their shoulder and pockets full of cash. No parades, no fanfare, but they were our heroes. For the first time in our history, most of our people were now fluent in English. That war gave us first hand knowledge of the outside world, and for the first time in our history we had folding money in our pockets. It changed everything.”

And then again, it changed nothing. In a speech he delivered as president, Dwight Eisenhower praised the American Indians for their service in combat. Of the tens of thousands of Indians who served under his command in Europe, not one had ever been discharged dishonorably. Not one Native American ever turned tail and ran away from a fight.

So guys like Donald Goodbird were even more confused when they came back home to discover that surveyors for the Army Corps of Engineers were marking out the hills above their towns – hills that had been theirs since time immemorial, overlooking rich and fertile river bottoms that had been protected by treaty for over a hundred years – for a massive dam that would be built as the centerpiece of the Pick/Sloan Plan. When the five primary Pick/Sloan dams were completed in the 1960s, twenty-three tribes of Indians had lost their treaty protected homelands lands to massive dams, and not one white town had been inundated. The Indians had gone off to distant continents to fight a war to protect their homeland. When they came home they would spend another twenty fighting to keep it. And they would lose.

For many Indians who stormed ashore with our father’s and uncles on the beaches at Normandy, so much had changed in their leaving, and so much had stayed the same in their coming home. What they saved for the people of Europe they would loose at home. In towns like Lodgegrass, Whiteshield, and Windowrock, in that other America most of us will never know, that’s the story you hear about D-Day.

Paul VanDevelder is the author of Savages and Scoundrels: The untold story of America’s road to empire through Indian territory (Yale University Press, 2009)

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