He is 81 now, this Tom Blakey I met Wednesday at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. He gives tours there, mostly to grade-school kids who look alternately wide-eyed and bored by what he is telling them. You can say they're too young to understand what happened June 6, 1944, and in the months that followed. But that wouldn't explain it all. None of us who wasn't there can understand. We can only guess.

        Staff Sgt. Tom Blakey, A Company, 1st Battalion, 82nd Airborne, was 23 years old when he parachuted into the middle of a Normandy field in the dead of a French night, behind German lines, a performer in the first act of the greatest invasion in the history of the world.

        He didn't think of it that way, though, not until years later, in the sultry and perfumed quiet of a New Orleans summer night, his wife and children in bed, the world he helped save and create peaceful and dreaming.

        “They tried to explain to us that we were doing something monumental,” he recalled. “To me it was no big deal. It was what we were supposed to do.”

        This is what they all say, these World War II veterans. I talk to them as often as I can, whenever I can, hoping some of who they are rubs off.

        They aren't bitter, boastful or self-pitying. They want no mention. They don't need it. It embarrasses them. They did what they had to do and then they came home. They never forgot their good fortune of coming home.

        Dick Kerin, who lives in Greenhills, fought on Iwo Jima. He has a newspaper photograph of himself from there. It shows a gaping hole in his shoulder, courtesy of a Japanese bullet. Pappy Hahn of Loveland fought in Europe. He has a book about the Battle of the Bulge. He can name for you men in the book's pictures.

        And so on. I talk to them when I can. In the WWII vets, I see a strength I don't see in myself, a sureness that comes from knowing who they really are and what they could summon from themselves in times of ultimate need.

        The vets know something about themselves we can only imagine in ourselves. What would we do, how would we act? Dropped into the middle of history's deadly pageant . . . who would we be?

        “Every generation has their problems and every generation has solved them,” Tom Blakey said. “I don't know if our generation was any better than any other. We figured the only way to get home was through France and Germany. So that's how we did it.”

        He fought through France. He jumped into Holland. He froze in the Ardennes Forest with Pappy Hahn. He was on a patrol once when the man next to him took a bullet to the head because he peeked for an instant over a Dutch hedgerow.

        “I went home in September of 1945,” Blakey said. “I started a business, raised a family, did everything an American boy was supposed to do. I used the GI Bill to buy a house. Nobody knew I was in the Army. Everybody was in the Army.”

        He gives talks locally, when asked. His theme is the Holocaust; his unit marched into Germany in August of 1945. It liberated a death camp. That experience answered a question Tom Blakey had: Why am I here?

        “That was why,” he said.

        Once, after one of his grandchildren wondered if the Holocaust were real, Blakey paid to fly all his grandkids to New Orleans, to tell each of them it was.

        “I did not want them to go through another day with any doubt,” he said.

        I ask him of the nature of his courage; he dismisses it. I ask him if we as Americans are still made of the same stuff Tom Blakey was, 58 years ago, alone in a French field, the fate of the world teetering beneath his muddy leather boots.

        “I don't think there's any question we are,” he said. “This last thing (Sept. 11) showed it. Americans will do what has to be done.”

        War is a horrific price to pay for self-awareness. Also, telling.

        Contact Paul Daugherty by phone: 768-8454; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.
       

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