Thursday, June 06, 2002

'I come here for those boys'

For decades, veteran Boyd Wilson kept his war memories to himself. Now, the D-Day Memorial volunteer tells how he beat the odds.

By BETH MACY
THE ROANOKE TIMES

   BEDFORD - You'll find him there most mornings, sitting on a bench or leaning against a wall at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford. Sometimes he even returns in the afternoons after going home for a nap or taking care of a few items on his wife's "honey-do" list.

    For decades, the Bedford-born Army veteran never spoke about June 6, 1944, the day he and 153,000 other Allied soldiers stormed the beaches at Normandy, the watershed event that hastened the liberation of France and the end of World War II. Now he talks about little else.

    Master Sgt. Boyd Earl Wilson served 26 years in the military before retiring to the Augusta County community of Stuarts Draft, where he worked as traffic manager for Del Monte Foods. He never touched a gun again.

    Then one of his old Bedford buddies, fellow D-Day veteran Roy Stevens, told him about the memorial that was going to honor the 19 boys from the Bedford area and the estimated 4,400 others known to have died in the D-Day invasion. Wilson and his wife, Shirley, packed their bags and bought a ranch house on the outskirts of Bedford.

    At the house, you'll find boxes of mementos from Wilson's days in the service - his Bronze and Silver stars, old photos, a Purple Heart - plus news articles about the D-Day Memorial. There is scads of correspondence from reporters and photographers, ranging from a French TV station to National Geographic and Southern Living.

    Many folks have spent time at the Wilson home in the past year, going through the old boxes and, if he's there, listening to Wilson finally open up.

    But Wilson usually isn't home.

    Instead, every day, he's somewhere near the memorial's Overlord Arch. Wearing badges that identify him both as a volunteer and a D-Day veteran, he talks when approached by visitors. Almost every day someone comes up to thank him and shake his hand.

    Mostly, though, he just sits there, thinking about the old boys from Bedford. He pictures the Hoback brothers, Bedford and Raymond, lying dead in the sand - and Raymond's Bible, which someone found later and mailed home to his mother.

    He listens to the noises made in the reflecting pool - pops engineered to sound just like German bullets hitting the surf.

    "It's exactly like Omaha Beach here," he says. "Only it was about 1,000 times louder."

***

    Wilson was 18 when he joined the National Guard, Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division. It was 1938, and times were hard.

    "I joined to have a little spending money,"

   he recalls. Wilson's father had left his mother - and his four children - when Boyd was 7.

    Wilson spent three years in the Guard before the company was activated and sent to Fort Meade, Md., for training, 10 months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He left on a train with 120 other guys from Bedford.

    Two years into the training, Wilson went into an Army hospital to have a wart removed from his foot. By the time he got out, his unit had moved to England to prepare for D-Day. Wilson asked to rejoin his childhood buddies in Company A, but the Army stuck him in the 18th Regiment of the 1st Division instead.

    Not only would Wilson fail to fight alongside his pals, but he was on his way to North Africa, where he would participate in the first major amphibious landing of World War II. Wilson's unit fought the German troops up the coast from Oran to Tunis. "We fought in the desert for a month," he recalls. "You'd get sunburned through your clothes."

    A year later, his unit invaded Sicily. "They dropped us off on a sandbar 500 yards from shore. You'd take two steps, and no bottom. I had 90 pounds of equipment on my back.

    "You'd go down [in the water], throw a piece off and come back up. Go down, throw a piece off and come back up."

    By the time he got to shore, he had no gun and no equipment. He says some Italians gave the troops guns and pointed them in the direction of the Germans. Wilson killed two Germans in Italy - that he knows of - and shot at many more.

    "I've got shrapnel in my gut right now," he says. "It only bothers me when I go through a metal detector."

    Wilson's unit was eventually sent to England to prepare for D-Day. He recalls the 12-hour boat ride to Normandy: "Seasick wasn't no name; you were done past that. You were so sick, you just wanted to die."

    There were 30 men on his boat, and he recalls seeing German booby traps, called "hedgehogs," buried in the surf. He was an infantry squad leader; 19 of the 30 men on his boat were killed.

    Although Wilson's memory has been fuzzy since a heart attack a few years ago - he sometimes gets details of his landings in Oran, Sicily and Normandy mixed up - he recalls the fear with clarity. "Scared wasn't no name. Any man says he wasn't scared is a damned liar."

    Wilson's World War II experiences are both unusual and ironic, according to D-Day Memorial President William McIntosh. "He was so upset that he'd been separated from his buddies, but by the time D-Day rolled around, his buddies were still green, and Boyd was a seasoned soldier with several valor awards and the experience of two successful amphibious landings behind him."

    What's more unusual, McIntosh adds, is that Wilson chose to re-enlist after he was sent home in 1945, shortly after V-E Day. "He got home to Bedford and looked around, and all his buddies were gone," 19 of them killed on D-Day and many others still serving in Europe.

    He met up with a gal from Lynchburg, got married and after a few months of intense newlywed-dom, he grew bored.

    "There weren't nothing going on here at all," as Wilson puts it, so he re-enlisted and joined the U.S. occupation of Germany with his new wife.

***

    Wilson has been visiting the memorial ever since construction started on it in 1997. Although several of the six remaining D-Day veterans who live near Bedford visit a couple times a week, he is the only one who goes every day.

    "I have no idea what he's thinking when he's there," says Shirley Wilson, whom he married after his second wife died in 1986. "I think he just likes to go up there and tell people what in the world went on - for the sake of the boys who didn't get back home."

    Shirley's daughter bought him the movie "Saving Private Ryan," but Wilson had to turn it off halfway through. It was too hard to watch. He tears up whenever he hears taps or sees the military cemetery at Normandy on the news. Sometimes he has nightmares of combat and wakes up shaking.

    "The first time I came here [to the memorial], I said, 'I'm back in it,'" says Wilson, who'll be 82 this summer. "But for some reason, I don't get choked up when I'm here."

    At a time when World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 1,100 a day, Wilson says he feels a responsibility to his old friends who perished on D-Day. "I come here for those boys," he says, nodding toward the statues of soldiers at the memorial.

    As McIntosh puts it: "Everything in his life feeds into D-Day. ... He's become a kind of self-appointed ambassador to those he meets and greets there."

    Bob Slaughter, the D-Day veteran who spearheaded the memorial, agrees.

    "It gives him meaning, and it also makes a real impression on the visitors."

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