Campbellton man's wartime jeep returns to Juno Beach exactly 80 years later

Eighty years to the day after Campbellton's Buck Cyr landed at Juno Beach, the jeep he drove across the sand as a 20-year-old soldier returned to the historic site.

The image of the jeep on the beach with Cyr's name etched in the sand is a powerful one for his daughter, Phyliss Roy. 

"It brought many a tear to my eye," she said. 

And seeing her father's army jeep with her own eyes was also an emotional experience for three generations of her family. 

"I could actually picture my father sitting behind the wheel of the jeep with his twinkling blue eyes and his smile, and I could hear his laughter and it just melted my heart," said Roy, who recently returned from a trip to Europe with her family to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. 

Putting her hands on the steering wheel that her father etched his name in during the war was particularly poignant. 

"The steering wheel was — it'll be forever embedded in my mind and in my heart. Just to touch it and to run my fingers so gently over where he carved his name, Buck Cyr, Campbellton, New Brunswick. And to hold it. The memories that come flooding back from the stories he told me — the few stories he told me about the war — and how he had looked for that jeep in 2005, was very, very emotional."

It was also an emotional day for Nick Obdam, who lives in the Netherlands and purchased the Second World War jeep for his family in 2022. 

It was Obdam who noticed Cyr's name carved into the steering wheel and set out to track down the family of a Canadian soldier whose fate was unknown to him at that time. 

Obdam eventually found a social media post about Cyr and noticed a message from a woman identifying herself as his daughter. 

He reached out to her and explained his find. 

Before long, Cyr's family began planning a trip to Holland to see the jeep — a trip that coincided with a school trip for one of Cyr's great-grandsons who happens to be named after him — Ewan Buck McCormack.

When the family landed at the Amsterdam airport, Obdam and the jeep were waiting for them. The powerful moment wasn't lost on Obdam. 

"I'm not made out of stones, so I also have some emotions, of course. At the moment you see somebody very happy and emotional touching the steering wheel."