D-Day survivors tell their stories.

Byline: Tom Hundley

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France _ They are old men now, with hearing aids and canes, with paid-up mortgages and an abundance of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They have come to this place for one last look.

For those who survived that day, it became the pivotal experience of their lives, the day that all others would be measured against. What they lived through on June 6, 1944, would stay with them for the rest of their days.

Sgt. Ray Lambert, a medic with the 1st Infantry Division, was in the first wave to hit the beach on D-Day.

"When we got within a thousand yards of the beach, you could hear the machine-gun bullets hitting off the front ramp of the boat," recalled Lambert, 83, a retired electrical engineer.

"The ramp went down, and we were in water over our heads. Some of the men drowned. Some got hit by the bullets. The boat next to ours blew up. Some of those men caught fire. We never saw them again," he said.

"When we got to the beach, I said to one of my men, Cpl. Meyers, `If there's a hell, this has got to be it.' And it was about a minute later that he got a bullet in his head.

"To make a long story short, only seven of the 31 men on my boat made it to the beach," said Lambert, one of several thousand U.S., British and Canadian veterans who have returned to Normandy to take part in Sunday's 60th anniversary ceremonies.

Lambert was severely wounded on D-Day but survived the ordeal, and _ miraculously _ so did Cpl. Herbert Meyers. The two were quite surprised to see each other at a veterans' reunion many years later.

Code-named "Overlord," the D-Day invasion began on the night of June 5 with an air bombardment of German positions in Normandy. During the early hours of June 6, three airborne divisions were dropped behind German lines, and at 6:30 a.m., the main force of 135,000 American, British and…