Charles Norman Shay, a Penobscot Native American and decorated U.S. Army medic who, as a 19-year-old on D-Day, repeatedly plunged into the surf at Omaha Beach to carry wounded soldiers to safety, died Wednesday at 101. He passed away peacefully at his home in Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse, Normandy, his longtime friend and carer Marie-Pascale Legrand said.
A native of Indian Island, Maine, Shay received the Silver Star for his actions on June 6, 1944, and France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor, in 2007. He had lived in France since 2018 to remain close to the Normandy shores where nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed and where he felt he could honor the men who died there. “I will die here,” he told CBS News in 2019, saying he believed he could “talk with the souls of the men that are still wandering on the beach here.”
On D-Day, amid mortars and artillery, Shay watched men in his landing craft cut down when the ramp fell and saw many wounded unable to escape the tide. He later described being ready to give his life but focused on his duty as a medic: “I had been given a job, and the way I looked at it, it was up to me to complete my job.” After a night spent exhausted in a grove above the beach, surrounded by the dead, he continued rescuing wounded for weeks before moving with American forces into eastern France and Germany. He was captured in March 1945 and liberated a few weeks later.
After World War II, Shay reenlisted partly because conditions for Native Americans in Maine—where reservation residents were not allowed to vote until 1954—remained dire. He served again as a medic in the Korean War, took part in U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, and later worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
For more than six decades Shay rarely spoke of his wartime experiences. He began attending D-Day commemorations in 2007 and in later years became a regular witness and advocate for remembrance and peace. He performed a traditional sage-burning on a bluff above Omaha Beach in memory of the fallen; a monument bearing his name stands nearby. On June 6, 2022, he entrusted the remembrance ceremony to Julia Kelly, a Crow veteran, and voiced sorrow at the return of war to Europe, saying the conflict in Ukraine was “a very sad situation.”
The Charles Shay Memorial group, which honors roughly 500 Native Americans who landed on Normandy’s beaches, posted that Shay “has returned home to the Creator and the Spirit World,” remembering him as “an incredibly loving father, grandfather, father-in-law, and uncle, a hero to many” whose legacy is “love, service, courage, spirit, duty and family.” Legrand said Shay died surrounded by loved ones.
