The shocking  twenty-five beginning minutes of “Saving private Ryan”, are talked about and are going on being talked about. The Steve Spielberg's picture, which has inaugurated, “hors concours”, the Venice cinema exhibition, is beating all income records have been recorded till now  
It deals with the most crude sequences of all the war cinematography: soldiers who pick up  their own legs taken off from their bodies, soldiers who hold their own quartered entrails,  bodies butchered by grenades, the sea red of blood. Spielberg has this way represented, following the atrocious and painful truth, the impact of the American units when disembarking in the so called Omaha beach, on June 6th 1944, the  “D-Day”, the day of the allies disembarkation in Normandy. 
I haven't seen the Spielberg's picture, but I have been, right twenty years ago, in the places of the disembarkation for a reportage. I wanted to understand how it works this “war scenario” which became meantime a tourist machine and I wondered why nearly four hundred thousand visitors went  every year to those places. There were not hotels, restaurants, luncheonettes, tobacconist's, stores, which did not show at the entrance, the geographic map bearing a writing that says “Les plages du débarquement”. 
On the map it was highlighted the conventional names the allies gave to the beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword. It  was immediately revealed the art, French at all, of award with hauls of legend and virtual triumph arcs not only the decisive events, as it was indeed general considered the “D-Day”, but also their minor symbols, as I could observe in the surroundings of Arromanches, from a high point of the coast, called St. Come-de-Fresné. 
The “D-Day” left in the sea, always some snarling, some rust “relics” which seemed to be abandoned rafts. But it was enough to look at them using binoculars to see them becoming  huge nets to trap seagulls. Another place where suggestion renewed was in Benouville, where the Orne river and the Caen channel stream parallel. In front of the iron bridge called Pegasus, a magic soundtrack started playing sailplane rustle, shots, missile explosions. The soundtrack was only in my memory. There was also the  plaintive sound of bagpipes that tuned up the “Blue Bonnets over the Border”. 
The episode, which the imaginary soundtrack referred to, was true.