It’s common knowledge that cowboys settled the American West.

Yet few know that the first soldier to storm Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, tilting the trajectory of the Second World War, liberating France, and changing the course of human history, is a bull-riding cowboy from Oklahoma.

Bill Parker thought rodeo would always be his life. He sure didn’t plan to be a 19-year-old private in the 116^th Infantry, 29^th Division of the U.S. Army, waking up at 3:30 a.m. for a beans breakfast on a Navy ship rocking across the choppy English Channel heading for a daring mission that just might be a death sentence.

As the wire cutter responsible for taking out the razor barriers set across the beach by enemy forces, Parker was “first boot” on Omaha Beach in leading the largest seaborne invasion in history.

When his craft carrying dozens of men landed, he had to climb into waist-deep water, carrying a rifle and a backpack filled with ammunition and dynamite to blow the barbed wire. He scrambled onto Omaha Beach at 6:31 a.m.

Machine gun bullets kicked up sand around him. He looked behind his lead group of five men and saw empty beach. A German artillery shell had hit Easy Company’s landing craft; 96% of the men in the unit were dead or wounded within a half hour.

On D-Day, casualties were heaviest at Omaha, one of five sectors on the Normandy coast, where nearly 133,000 Allied forces landed.

On the hill in front of Parker was a fortified German pillbox spraying machine gun fire. He was a sitting duck.

“We didn’t have anything to knock them out,” Parker said.

The pinned-down men lay in the shallow water, a poor excuse for suitable cover, while the gunners fired on other landing craft. 

“The Navy had orders not to bring the battleship closer to shore, but they came in closer and fired shells 8 or 10 feet over our heads to knock that pillbox out,” Parker said.

That thunderous burst of fire from the USS Doyle sounding like a hundred freight trains screeching past his head is the reason Parker now has trouble hearing. But it sprung him loose, saved his life, and helped change the course of the war.

“I give the Navy credit for saving the invasion,” Parker said. “We were hung up, and they saved us.”

The cowboy from Oklahoma didn’t have a lot of bars on his uniform, but he was clearly a leader. A few dozen stragglers were now following him.

He led them past the bluffs inland to a sunken road. The dazed privates, out of ammunition, wanted to know what to do now.

Parker said he was staying until daylight. He knew the dead men had ammo, and he had a plan.

He made it back to Omaha Beach to re-arm.

“You can’t imagine what that beach looked like. There were bodies everywhere. The sea was blood red,” he said.

He’s not sure how he did it – the nightmarish gore is too traumatic to recall. But he knows he was able to take the ammunition from the dead men – as much as he could carry.  

The reunited group came to the French town, Vierville-sur-Mer, where an Army Lieutenant approached Parker.

“Sergeant, get your men in this foxhole. We’re going to take this town,” he ordered.

Parker said, “All right, sir, but I’m a private, not a sergeant.”

“Well, you are one now,” the officer replied.

Within a day of landing on the European mainland, the courageous private was promoted to Staff Sgt.

He would fight through France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Germany, hedge grove to hedge grove, farmhouse to farmhouse, a .45 six-shooter strapped to his hip just like John Wayne, until the Allied forces triumphed.

At the time, Parker didn’t even know his side had won.

He had crossed the River Elbe in Germany, an area that would become part of the border between East and West Germany. A group of Russian soldiers was drinking and dancing with a group of girls. Was the madness finally over? he wondered. 

In fact, the war had ended three days earlier. But communications were archaic and fragmented; if the Germans were still fighting, Parker, now a platoon sergeant, and his men had to fight back. 

Finally, word got to everyone, and the shooting stopped.

“First thing I did when I got back was got married. And it was the best thing,” Parker said.

Bill and Colleen were married for 73 years until she passed in 2018.

“Nothing worse has happened to me than to lose her,” he said. “I go by the cemetery every day to speak with her. She was a good woman, and I miss her so much.”

On Saturday night in Tulsa at the BOK Center, TSgt. Bill Parker, who is two years shy of his 100th birthday and still rides a horse and throws a rope, will be honored with PBR’s Be Cowboy award, given to heroes across the country who have made important contributions to their communities, and in cases like Parker’s, to greater humanity.

William Norman Parker’s life as a cowboy began the moment he was born in a tent in a southern California oil field on Nov. 1, 1924.

His dad, Guy, a self-sufficient farmer who took the family to California when times got tough in Oklahoma, declared: “This boy’s name is Bill. He was born a cowboy. He’ll be a cowboy. And he’ll die a cowboy.”

Guy was standing on sandy ground, but that proclamation might as well have been set in stone.

His dad horse-traded, and Bill was put on a horse before he could walk. At five, he was riding milk cows and steers.

The family was too poor to afford a saddle; Bill rode bareback until he was 12. By 16, he entered rodeos, riding broncs and bulls.

“On a Friday night, they’d pay you a dollar to ride a bull and a dollar to ride a bronc,” Parker said. “I’d ride one of each, then go on Saturday and make two dollars more. Sometimes I’d be back again on Sunday. I could buy my girlfriend a candy bar and a soda, and I imagined I was the richest cowboy in the country.”

The bulls were far from the more rhythmic bovine athletes in the PBR.

“These bulls today are trained and bred to buck,” he said. “Those were from the pasture and the mountains. You didn’t know what you were going to get.”

Still, Parker stayed on most of the time.

“I rode at smaller rodeos, but I was good. If war didn’t come around, I’d have given (bull riding legend) Jim Shoulders some competition,” he said with a laugh. “But two years of crawlin’ on my belly and shootin’ at Germans, it was time for other things.”

Mainly, it was time to take care of his family.

Before he was drafted, at a pie supper fundraiser, Bill saw a beautiful girl named Colleen, also of Choctaw descent. He handed her a quarter – everything he had – and won her chocolate pie.

Later, when Colleen was leaving with her friends, Bill rode his horse up to the stunning black-haired beauty, took her by the hand, and pulled her up onto the horse. It wasn’t long before she wanted to be Mrs. Parker.

They were high school seniors. The teenage boy who couldn’t locate Europe on a map was soon heading for infantry training.

“I don’t want you to be a widow at 19,” Bill told Colleen. “Wait for me.”

And he went off to war.

Colleen waited. And wrote to Bill every week. He wrote back every time he could.

The winter of 1944 was especially brutal – cold and miserable. He was unable to shower for 43 days and grew a thick red beard. Then, five days before the Battle of the Bulge began, Sgt. Parker took a shrapnel hit, which prompted a nurse to say his shoulder looked like hamburger.

He could barely hold a rifle but was released early to fight in the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the U.S. in World War II, where Germany was defeated and would retreat the rest of the war.

Parker remembers wounded soldiers sitting to rest against the trees in the Belgian forest. When he returned at night, the men were frozen solid, icicles dangling from noses and beards. The Germans lost 98,000 soldiers, while 16,000 Americans were killed in this one pivotal battle.

Earlier, Parker nearly lost a foot when hit by exploding shrapnel. He gritted through two weeks of battle but then couldn’t remove his boot.

He was diagnosed with gangrene. A medic in an English hospital said the foot was going to be amputated.

“When I heard that, I hollered, ‘You are not taking my foot!’”

A nearby captain overheard the ruckus.

“Get a bucket of hot water and Epson salt. Soak this until the metal comes out,” he ordered.

The remedy worked. Parker kept his foot and, two weeks later, headed back to fight. At the time, the Germans were being pushed out of France but still held Belgium and Holland; it took a lot for an experienced Sergeant to be sent home.

The Army understood his enormous value. Legend has it Sgt. Parker was the only man to have landed at Omaha Beach and then fought all the way to Germany.

The self-assured, always coolheaded cowboy was looked up to by countless young men. One was a teenager who didn’t appear to be more than 15.

“He looked so young I didn’t know what to do with him,” Parker said.

He made the boy his runner and asked him to stay in a foxhole while Parker checked on his platoon. When Parker returned, he saw a lifeless torso. The boy’s head had been blown off.

The indescribable horrors of 200 days in combat across 600 miles of Europe on foot also brought gallows humor.

Once, Parker was trying to clear out a building to give the platoon a place to sleep that night.

In the dim light, he saw an imposing man standing, looking out a window.

He hollered, “Put your hands up and turn around!”

The man stood stone-cold still. Parker yelled again. Then he drew his .45 and shot his head clean off.

“I went to see what I’d done,” Parker said. “It was Hitler…a tall, life-size bust of Hitler. My men would never forget that. Every chance, they’d introduce me as, ‘This is Sgt. Parker, who shot Hitler.’”

Parker was once asked if he shot any real soldiers.

“I’m not gonna go there,” he said. Then he continued, “Well, when I shot, I didn’t miss. And I used up a whole washtub of ammunition.”

Parker was awarded two Purple Hearts, the French Legion of Honor medal, a Bronze Star for bravery, and several other medals.

A member of the Choctaw Nation by birth, he was given the Choctaw Warrior flag by a chief in a special ceremony last October.

For many years, Parker carried a heavy weight of horrors experienced on a continent he barely knew existed before being sent over to liberate the entire place. His nightmares wouldn’t stop.

“Bill, the war is over,” Colleen would gently tell him.

But, of course, it wasn’t. An armistice doesn’t control what goes on in a man’s head.

On June 6, 2022, Sgt. Parker returned to Omaha Beach. He looked out from the bluff and again saw all those bodies. 

Then he noticed nobody was shooting at him.

The sounds of gunfire and explosions were replaced by the squealing laughter of children splashing in the water below. Dogs rolled in the grass. Families had picnic blankets spread out.

A French man put his hand on Bill’s shoulder and thanked him for saving his country.

The peaceful blue sky and clean water cleared his mind. The images of horror flew away like birds through prison bars. He hasn’t had a nightmare since.

“I’ve lived a good life,” Bill Parker said. “I didn’t have much. But I had the best wife, a good saddle, a good horse, and that’s all I needed.”

Andrew Giangola is the author of Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit in Professional Bull Riding, available on Amazon.com and PBRShop.com, with proceeds benefitting injured bull riders.