Benedetti said his respect for those who hit the beach in the historic offensive of 1944 deepens at the thought of what the survivors did after many of them — including his dad — went on to defeat Nazi Germany in the miserable Battle of the Bulge.
They came home and built the global phenomenon that was postwar America. "That's what's amazing to me. That's the part that gives me goosebumps," Benedetti said.
"That whole generation is basically gone before our eyes. We owe so much to them."
The "D" in D-Day stood simply for the day of the invasion by more than 7,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft. The day before the intended landing was D-minus-1, the day after D+1.
Seven decades after the launch of Operation Overlord, June 6 remains for many a day of mourning, gratitude and somber reflection. It's all that for Petaluma's Ned Foley, who just returned from touring the hallowed beaches of Normandy.
"I never really appreciated the enormity of it," said Foley, who's 67 and a Marine infantry veteran of the Vietnam war. "You don't realize the amount of real estate those guys covered."
The heavily fortified beaches — code-named Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword, Juno — spread across about 50 miles, roughly the distance from Jenner to Inverness. Foley said that to stand on the Normandy coast and imagine the poor weather, equipment failures and withering defensive fire encountered by the Allies swells his reverence.
Like his friend Dan Benedetti, the Marine vet said it's striking to him that the GIs who survived D-Day and the frigid, bloody slog on toward Germany "all came back and went to work."
Among them was Francis "Jeep" Sanza, one of Wine Country's few known surviving veterans of the Battle of Normandy and, coincidentally, a retired Clover Stornetta Farms salesman.
"Seventy years, good God. It's hard to believe, isn't it?" Sanza said from his home in Napa. "Can you believe I'm going to be 96 years old?"
As he waded towared the beach as a member of an Army automotive unit, Sanza was grateful that the landing craft also had unloaded a half-track truck.
"We tried to stay behind it," he said. He recalls the bullets in the air and the knee-deep water. "Boy," he said, "there was a lot of sand."
Sanza's nickname — Jeep — came to him a short while later, when Gen. George Patton chose him as one of his drivers. They spent a great deal of time together through the Third Army's push across Europe.
Sanza said that as horrible as the landing at Normandy was for him, the siege of Bastogne in Belgium in December of '44 was worse. Nearly a year after D-Day, in the spring of 1945, he witnessed Patton's tearful disappointment at President Eisenhower's announcement that the Russians, not the Americans, would strike the final blow and enter Adolf Hitler's Berlin.
In the waning days of the war, Sanza welcomed the surrender of vast numbers of German soldiers, many of them only boys. "They were just glad to get it over with, too," he said.
All these years after D-Day and the arduous march on Germany, Sanza said, "I try not to think about it.
"When I go to bed at night, I think about it sometimes. What I did, what my buddies did."
D-Day has for years been a special day for Jean Schulz and fans of her late husband's universally read comic strip. Charles Schulz, who served in World War II but not at Normandy, began honoring the sacrifices made on D-Day in a "Peanuts" comic strip in 1993.
"The more he began to think back," Jean Schulz said, "the more he began to realize what a turning point that was for the world."
In sharp contrast to his daily whimsy, the elder Schulz drew D-Day strips that simply and solemnly acknowledged those who served and died in the Allied invasion of Hitler-gripped Europe.
D-Day of 1998 fell on a Sunday and Schulz marked the occasion with a color strip that injected a drawing of Snoopy dressed as a GI into a photo of general and future president Dwight Eisenhower's pre-landing address to troops.
Schulz also became a major donor and advocate of the National D-Day Memorial. It opened in Bedford, Va., on June 6, 2001, 16 months after the cartoonist died in Santa Rosa at age 77.
Reflecting on the D-Day strips her husband commenced at 70, Jean Schulz said, "As we get older, we realize what other people have done for us. I think that's exactly what happened for him."
Dan Benedetti, the Clover Stornetta chairman, is rather astounded by what the 70th anniversary of the landing at Normandy holds for him.
Today he'll attend the funeral for friend and former longtime Clover employee Don Heid. Like Benedetti's father, Heid, who died in Santa Rosa on May 27 at age 91, took part in Day 1 of the invasion of Normandy.
Benedetti regards it a most appropriate day to honor a man who risked his life for his country and for the next half-century worked a dairy-industry job that allowed him to command the doling of innumerable scoops of free ice cream at the Sonoma County Fair.
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