"We had trained so much that everything came quite natural, except one thing we didn’t do in training is to allow people to die." (Video Interview, 14:54)

Joseph Peter Vaghi

Lt. Commander Joseph Vaghi off Omaha Beach June 6, 1944. War: World War, 1939-1945

Branch: Navy

Unit: USS Neshoba (APA 216); 6th Naval Beach Battalion

Service Location: Notre Dame, Indiana; Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Radford, Virginia; England; Omaha Beach, Normandy, France; Okinawa Island (Ryukyu Islands); Philippines; Japan

Rank: Lieutenant Commander

Joseph Vaghi was a Beachmaster at Normandy on June 6, 1944, a job he described "much like a traffic cop at a very busy intersection." Beachmasters controlled the flow of men off the ships, communicated with men already on land and ships at sea, and oversaw tending of the wounded. Vaghi was the first man off his LCI (Landing Craft Infantry), which soon afterwards took a hit from an enemy shell. That day, he witnessed many acts of heroism, saw the oldest man in his company killed in an explosion, and ran into a college classmate who asked him, "Hi Joe, what the hell are you doing here?"