The 67th anniversary of D-Day almost came and went this year, without any fan fare in this column. Unbelievably, there wasn't anything in my newspaper on the anniversary this year. I guess when you get that old, if it isn't an even decade, people forget you. I would have missed it, had it not been for a follow-up story the day after about two Ohioan's who had gone to France with Senator Kerry and Congresswoman Kaptur to commemorate the Normandy Landing at the restored cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. Sixty-seven years earlier, U.S. Rangers scaled those same 100-foot cliffs. The original landing force was 225 men and two days later only 90 could still fight.

In the story, the two men, Don Jakeway and Herman Zerger, told of men and friends falling right and left of them in the rain of bullets during the Normandy invasion, and afterwards those who survived asking the question, "Why not me?" They told of making a promise "To Pay Back Somehow" and of both men coming home to do just that "because God had things for them to do back home in the Buckeye State."

As I read the story, I thought of the passing this year of my good Buckeye friend and Veteran, Fred Machol, who you regular readers knew as "The Man In The Hat." I always wrote about Fred on D-Day and even in death Fred still has something to teach us.

I was thinking back to an interview I did of Fred, who was in counter-intelligence, and "in the room" when the Normandy Invasion was planned and strategized. If memory serves me correctly, Fred once told me of having to frisk General Eisenhower before the General could go in that room to plan his own invasion. If you have studied history, or taken the easy way out and watched "Saving Private Ryan," you know that the Germans were completely surprised that morning when the greatest naval armada the world has ever assembled, four thousand ships strong, appeared out of nowhere on the horizon.

As I thought of the element of surprise in planning that invasion, I fast-forwarded to the feeding frenzy surrounding my beloved Buckeyes today, and the crazy media environment we live now in. Could we have pulled that invasion off, I wondered, in today's world, a world of twitter twitter, tweet tweet, a world of get it first rather than get it right, a world of Freedom of Information and take no prisoners journalism, a world in which I make a name for myself, by impinging the names of others.

Could the invasion that saved Democracy and freed the world from an evil Adolf Hitler have surprised the Germans, or instead would it have been road kill on some reporters Blackberry or Twitter feed? Might we all be German now?

You be the judge.

Don and Herman and Fred, and all of their generation came back after that invasion and asked "Why Not Me?" Having stared death in the face, they answered it by paying back and paying forward, in their families, their communities, and their country.

It strikes me right now that many in today's generation also ask that same question. Except never having stared death in the face, theirs is "Why Not Me!" Whereas Fred's and Don's and Herman's answer to "why not me?" was giving, for too many today in public life, in athletics, in entertainment, in business, in the media, in politics, the answer to "Why Not Me!" is taking. Instead of what's in it for you, instead of what's in it for us, it is what's in it for me.

With everything swirling around us now, not only Buckeyes but all of society could use less of the latter, and instead a good dose of the examples set by the Fred's and Don's and Herman's of the world.