The New York Times has this brilliant story about "Bill Millin, a Scottish bagpiper who played highland tunes as his fellow commandos landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and lived to see his bravado immortalized in the 1962 film The Longest Day, died on Wednesday in a hospital in the western England county of Devon. He was 88."
Whilst his buddies were fighting their way up the beach on June 6, 1944, Mr. Millin was playing bagpipes to cheer them up. "'I shall never forget hearing the skirl of Bill Millin’s pipes,' one of the commandos, Tom Duncan, said years later. 'As well as the pride we felt, it reminded us of home, and why we were fighting there for our lives and those of our loved ones.'"
What is truly amazing is the fact that on this bloody day the bagpiper, walking erect on Sword Beach, did not shot to smithereens. "He said he found out later, after meeting Germans who had manned guns above the beach, that they didn’t shoot him 'because they thought I was crazy.'"
WFDS
What's the difference between onions and bagpipes? No one crys when you cut up a bagpipe
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