The photograph is one of the iconic images from the Allied invasion of Normandy, the 80th anniversary of which we mark today. It shows American soldiers – kids, really – wading toward a hostile beach on a momentous mission.

Awaiting them was withering German fire and utter chaos. Their duty? To, in the words of a D-Day prayer broadcast later that morning by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “set free a suffering humanity.”

They were America’s youth, having been drafted or voluntarily enlisting from small towns and big cities from coast to coast, united by their mission and their bond with the man next to him. Among them were many from Massachusetts, young men like Franklin Simon, Bill Soule, Marvin Gilmore, and Christy Fier, who made news this week when they returned to Normandy as part of the select small group of living D-Day veterans.

Looking at these young men in the photo, having just left the relative safety of their landing craft to begin the long trudge across the open field of fire, it is not easy for those of us today – who enjoy security and prosperity that their brave actions made possible – to imagine what they were thinking.

Certainly, they must have thought first and foremost of staying alive for the next minute, hour, day. Beyond that, perhaps these 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds thought of their hometowns, their sweethearts, their families. Probably none of them, in that moment of crisis, thought that they were heroes. But we know today, that is exactly what they were.

Such sense of duty and honor and sacrifice is remarkable when viewed through the lens of history and yet, for that generation that has accurately been dubbed our “Greatest,” so too was it felt widely enough to be almost standard. But the arc of history does not always bend toward widely felt values of duty, honor, and sacrifice.

This thought struck me as I considered the actions of D-Day’s heroes with certain members of their corresponding generation in 2024.

The young American soldiers who landed in France on June 6, 1944 were fighting to free enslaved populations and countries far from their own hometowns. That day alone, 2,501 of them would give the ultimate sacrifice on the Normandy coast. Their mission was a bloody but necessary step essential to defeating the criminal Nazi regime, and by extension, to ending the systematic murder of European Jews.

Eighty years later, certain young men and women at our institutions of higher learning may share the same fervor of their Greatest Generation predecessors, but without the moral compass, understanding, and willingness to sacrifice their own safety and interests. They seek not to defend an oppressed Jewish nation, but to call for its elimination. The campus protesters we have witnessed in Boston and across the country in recent months equate Israel’s actions to defend itself – to survive and exist – with the unprovoked assault, murder, and rape of Israeli communities by Hamas terrorists last Oct. 7. Those who would suggest that such a shameful moral equivalency exists are ignorant – of facts, of history, of fundamental truths of democracy – and are utterly lacking the moral beacon that defines right and wrong.

Today, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, we are thankful that this nation had the young adult generation that it did in 1944. Because beyond the superb young men and women who voluntarily serve in our armed forces today, I wonder how many others from their generation would answer the call to duty and sacrifice that their predecessors heard and courageously accepted eight decades ago.

Edward M. Flynn represents District 2 on the Boston City Council and is a veteran of the US Navy and served in Operation Enduring Freedom.