COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France -- While the United States women's national team continued its preparations for a World Cup game against Sweden on Thursday in Le Havre, the players' friends and family members visited nearby Omaha Beach and the Normandy American Cemetery on Tuesday.
And they didn't have just any tour guide.
An American veteran of the Normandy invasion in World War II, Steve Melnikoff spoke to the group as it first visited one of the windswept beaches where Allied troops came ashore in June 1944, and then the cemetery where more than 9,000 Americans who died in the invasion are buried.