In 2006, then-NFL linebacker Donnie Edwards was talking to a group of World War II veterans who wanted to visit Normandy, but they felt they were too old to make the trip.

Edwards volunteered on the spot to take the former paratroopers to France, and they quickly agreed. That brief conversation ultimately resulted in Edwards and some of his friends making their first trip with World War II veterans to the battlefields they had risked their lives on decades ago.

Their trip began in Holland, where U.S. and British paratroopers landed in September 1944 as part of Operation Mark …