It was 64 years ago that more than 130,000 Allied Troops fought their way ashore at Normandy. Over 9,000 Americans are buried in a French cemetery there. I knew one man who made it out alive — Jack Truluck.

Anybody who saw "Saving Private Ryan" should have known Jack Truluck. On June 6, 1944, Jack navigated one of the landing craft that dropped our boys on Omaha Beach. After the drop off, but before he could back away from the shoreline, a German artillery shell made a direct hit on Jack’s Higgins boat.

Jack’s only choice was to swim ashore. Unarmed and with bullets flying all around him, Jack crawled over dead bodies in the surf. Then, from behind, he heard the familiar high pitched whine of another Higgins boat.

It was a fellow coxswain getting ready to pull away from the beach. He signaled Jack to swim out to his boat. Jack boarded his friend’s landing craft just as another German artillery shell blew that boat into bits and pieces.

Here’s Jack, for the second time within minutes, making an impromptu landing on the beach at Normandy. "Nobody should have to do this more than once," Jack thought of his bizarre wartime experience.

Eventually he was evacuated back to England. His wounds proved to be nonlife threatening, but were a ticket back to the States. For him the war was over.

Jack pursued a career in journalism. When I knew Jack he was an investigative reporter for The State newspaper in Columbia, S. C. By then his hair was silver and there was less of it. But what a guy was Jack Truluck. His instinct for getting to the heart of a matter was unparalleled. He had few equals in his chosen profession. Jack retired from The State paper in the late eighties. During his retirement, and before cancer got him, Jack rarely spoke of D-Day. But when he did, he’d give you a classic Truluck smile and tell you that he never worried about anything anymore. Hinting at that terrible day on the beach in 1944, Jack would say: "After that everything’s gravy."