Local D-Day veteran: 'It's still very vivid'
In the blurred, black-and-white image, captured in the heat of combat, soldier Huston Riley is shown crawling ashore through barricades - and into history.
Riley now lives on Mercer Island, where he was interviewed by KOMO News' Charlie Harger and Charlotte Starck on Saturday - the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landing that saved Europe from the Nazis.
 D-Day veteran Huston Riley |
"All the memories come back real quick," he says. "It was quite an experience. I wouldn't want to go through it again."
Riley says the boat he rode in to "bloody Omaha" was in the first wave to hit the beach amid a storm of German bullets and shells. The boat was hit right after he got out of it.
Under constant fire, the 22-year-old Army private began to swim to shore.
"I guess I was hit 12, 13 times - nothing fatal - helmet, foot, shoe, pack," he remembers.
As he crawled onto the beach he was the American soldier captured by photographer Robert Capra in his world-famous photo.
"Two guys dragged me up, and when I stood up - that's when I got hit. But one guy was a photographer - I didn't know how the hell he got there," Riley says. "The water was just redder than hell. It was fierce."
Riley's still clearly recalls the killing field.
"God, it was something else, a lot of guys got it that day," he says.
That bloody battle left him with more than just vivid memories - Riley still carries a German bullet.
"Yeah, I still carry it," he says. "It's still there."
It's only been five years since the world learned of Riley's identity as the American solder in the D-Day photo, thanks to an amateur historian. Riley hopes the world sees him and remembers them all.
"I kind of like to feel it's a representative of a lot of guys - especially the ones that didn't make it."
But with so many World War II vets in their sunset years, their numbers are dwindling. Tales of D-Day will soon only be told by newsreels and history books.
Riley says he was patched up and sent back into battle after D-Day. Six months later his war career ended when he was injured in the Battle of the Bulge.