By PAUL FATTIG

Private First Class Cecil Nicholson fought his way onto Omaha Beach on Friday.

He slogged up the bloody beach under the howling shells hurling overhead. He heard the screams of the wounded and the moans of the dying. And he saw the dead piling up as they were mowed down by enemy machine-gun fire.

But this D-Day, a repeat of the same trip he took on June 6, 1944 during World War II, was in the comfortable confines of the Tinseltown USA theater in Medford where "Saving Private Ryan" is showing.

"Those obstacles in the water, they seemed realistic," he observed. "I don't really know about the rest of it. I never looked back.

"Going in on the beach, I could see this hill in front of me," he says. "The quicker I could get to that and off the beach, the better. That's all I was thinking about."

Back on D-Day, when the Allies punched into Nazi-held Normandy, France, Nicholson was 22 years old, fresh from Bly, Ore.

Today, he is 76, a retired city of Ashland employee. He and Margaret, his wife of 52 years, live in Ashland.

But he has never forgotten the day he was among 155,000 Allied troops swarming onto Normandy.

During the 50th anniversary of the invasion in 1994, he visited Normandy.

The Allies had gathered a huge armament -- 12,000 aircraft, 5,300 vessels and nearly 1,000 tanks. But they would pay a heavy price: some 9,000 Allied troops would be killed or wounded.

Nicholson was a grunt attached to the fourth platoon of A Company, First Battalion, 16th Infantry.

Until 6 a.m. that historic day, Nicholson hadn't seen any action. He had spent a year helping train officers at Fort Benning, Ga.

"I was as green as a gourd," he said. "But that may have been a benefit to me. I didn't know what to be afraid of.

"I was with guys who had fought in Africa and Sicily," he added. "They knew what it was all about."

He temporarily joined a group of Rangers, similar to the group led by the fictitious Capt. Miller played by actor Tom Hanks in the epic war film. He helped them knock out a German gun emplacement that had been keeping the Americans pinned down.

Nicholson, who was a sergeant when he was discharged, would survive D-Day only to be wounded three times during the next 10 months as he fought his way deep into Germany.

His left hand was shattered; a piece of shrapnel would pierce his chest.

"They finally let me go then," he said.

His path through Normandy and that taken by the central characters in the movie interwined, Nicholson observed.

"The movie was pretty realistic in a lot of ways, capturing the Germans and all that," he said.

The scenes of American soldiers shooting German POWs reflected reality, he says.

"That happened a lot," he said. "I saw it."

But he figures that Hollywood took a few liberties when it came to re-creating history.

"I think it was pushed a little too much," he said of the bloody battles. "There was a lot of fighting going on like that. But the movie had a little too much."

Nor did the scenery depict the Normandy he knew. Missing were the apple orchards.

"And I don't ever remember seeing German tanks like that," he said.

"I wouldn't want to see the movie again," he added. "But I'm glad I saw it. It reminded me of a lot of things that I had forgotten."

He also firmly believes that D-Day and those who died should never be forgotten.