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Sometimes, I say yes to a story after which second-guess it.
Like I’m now, as I drive to Wakefield.
To see Tim Gray.
Who, don’t get me mistaken, I like. And admire. If you ask me, he’s doing God’s work.
He just finished his twenty ninth documentary on World War II, this one narrated by Tom Brokaw.
For his first in 2006, he flew five D-Day vets from Rhode Island back to Normandy.
And now he says he desires to do the identical for me.
Except right here.
It’s this amazing technology, he says, that may put me on Omaha Beach, as much as my knees in water, with GIs landing around me as Germans send down fire.
His goal, he says, is to show the video generation about history, and that’s why I’m second-guessing.
A column about some classroom thing?
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No, says Tim, it’s not study material, it’s virtual reality. You know, with the $700 headsets where you experience things like being in a shark cage?
Except Tim created an 18-minute experience, viewed through that headset, putting you in D-Day.
So I park on Main Street in Wakefield and knock, but this isn’t just any door — it results in an incredible place you’ll be able to’t imagine is in Rhode Island.
Although Tim’s most important profession is documentaries, he has obsessively collected World War II items, enough to create a museum. Including Anne Frank’s own “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” book signed by her. A replica of “Mein Kampf” that belonged to Adolf Hitler. A 5-foot piece of the USS Arizona, which went down in Pearl Harbor, and countless weapons, artifacts and real-time headlines.
But this VR thing, he says.
Tim is 55, with the keenness of a child, and the haircut of 1, too. He grew up in Kingston, went to URI, then began a profession as a TV sports guy. But after 15 years, he decided that 90 seconds per story was too limiting.
He preferred an hour. And also to concentrate on what he feels is history’s most significant event — World War II.
“We are who we’re today due to what they did for us,” Tim says of its veterans.
He takes me to a viewing room, and as I stand, he puts a $700 virtual reality headset over my eyes.
The “experience” is named Omaha Beach VR. It’s archival footage he someway edited into latest video recently shot at Normandy with VR technology.
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I push a start-trigger and immediately, all I see is water in 3D and the beach approaching. It’s like being within the front row of IMAX, except it’s 360 degrees, so if you turn, you see silhouettes of among the greater than 5,000 ships that carried 160,000 troops from England to France that day.
Seventy-eight years ago.
Soon, I’m inside a landing craft, reaching out to try to the touch the metal partitions. I see archival shots of Nazi pillboxes spliced above current video of the beach.
Then I hear the voice of somebody I once interviewed — Richard Fazzio of Woonsocket, now, at 96, one in every of the last surviving Rhode Island D-Day vets.
That day at 6 a.m., at age 19, Fazzio was driving 35 soldiers as coxswain of one in every of the boats.
“I don’t think there was an atheist in there,” he says in Gray’s VR film.
Then he speaks of hearing bullets hitting, and of getting no alternative but to drop the ramp.
“And the soldiers began pouring out,” he says, “and I seen ‘em dropping. I see ‘em getting shot.” Now Fazzio is crying. “It’s a sight I’ll always remember.”
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That’s when a bullet hit him under his arm and went out his back.
Then you’re feeling you’re on the beach, and also you hear the remembrance of infantryman Harold Baumgarten of the Bronx.
“I looked up,” he says, “and an 88 went off in front of me. Ripped my cheek off, ripped my upper jaw off, a hole within the roof of the mouth, teeth and gums on my tongue.”
But there was worse around him.
“One of my best buddies had his face shot off. All these guys you knew as your folks, you trained with them, they’re laying dead.”
And yet he had to maintain going.
You feel you’re going, too, as you’ve no visual of the room, and even your personal body – just the 360 panorama contained in the headset.
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Steven Spielberg, Tim told me, later consulted Baumgarten for the D-Day scene in “Saving Private Ryan.”
That’s some scene.
I doubted another could make you experience that day as intensely.
But Tim Gray’s virtual reality put you right there — surrounded by shots of real soldiers, not actors.
I’m glad I said yes to this story.
mpatinki@providencejournal.com
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