Happy landings, old friend

This past Friday afternoon, a special American hero was laid to rest in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery.

His name was Ed Jeziorski, and I first met him in 1990. It was shortly before the 46th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, France, during World War II.

Ed had been a paratrooper with Company C, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. In the predawn hours of June 6, 1944, he was one of thousands of airborne troops dropped behind enemy lines.

Because I also had been a paratrooper, and experienced combat in Vietnam, we were brothers twice over. The bond between us was immediate.

Ed put on a pot of coffee and invited me to sit down at the kitchen table in his Charlottesville home. Then, during the course of the afternoon, he told me things he had kept to himself for decades.

Takes one to know one

You see, there is a place only combat veterans know. It is where the endless tears are kept, and where the memories that could make you cry forever are hidden.

You don’t want to go there often, but sometimes you do. Ed and I went there together that day.

I remember at one point he had patted the top of my hand with his, as we both blinked back tears. I had gone there that day to hear Ed’s story, and ended up sharing much of my own.

I talked about hellacious firefights, and he told me about the early hours of D-Day, and the chaos in the air above the drop zones. German gunners had opened up with everything they had on the swarm of C-47 aircraft darkly silhouetted against a moon-lit sky.

Descent into chaos

He said the horrifying sound of bullets and shrapnel tearing through the plane sounded “like someone was taking handfuls of gravel and throwing it against the metal sides.”

Just jumping from an aircraft at night with more than 100 pounds of equipment strapped to you is knee-shaking scary. Making a combat jump has to send the fear-factor right off the scale.

“We were all looking over

our left shoulder at the jump light, waiting for it to turn green,” Ed told me. “When it did, an alarm, like a clock, went off and Lt. Parks yelled, ‘Are you ready?’

“We all started to yell we were. Then he said, ‘Let’s go,’ and the ‘go’ part kind of trailed away as he left the door.”

Ed originally had been in the seventh position, but changed places with a superstitious buddy who had been number 13 in the stick. His friend, and many others, were dead before they hit the ground.

The first thing Ed saw when he exited the aircraft was a blizzard of upcoming tracer bullets.

One bullet cut through the American flag he wore on his shoulder, but didn’t break his skin.

Then a huge ball of fire and greasy black smoke erupted right below him when a C-47 crashed. Somehow he managed to reach the ground without being shot or burned to death.

For more than a month, Ed and his unit were involved in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Perhaps the worst of it occurred on June 9, at the La Fiere bridge and causeway.

Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall was chief historian of the European Theater of Operations during World War II.

He wrote that “the battle for the La Fiere causeway was probably the bloodiest small unit struggle in the experience of American arms.”

Through sheer guts and determination the American paratroopers managed to take the absolutely critical position.

To do it, they had to charge for hundreds of yards straight into the teeth of the German defense, which had orders to hold it at all costs.

Except for some knocked-out tanks along the narrow road, the GIs were completely exposed to the withering machinegun fire and exploding shells.

“There was no letup in the firing,” Ed had said. “Keep moving, keep moving.

“The whining of the bullets as they were going by you was an unbroken thing. I don’t know how we took it, but we did.”

More than 500 Americans were killed or wounded taking the bridge.

That brutal engagement and many others decimated the 507th.

Going into D-Day the regiment had 3,200 officers and men. Six weeks later there were only 700 still standing.

Ed was wounded twice during the war, and decorated as many times for valor. He and brave individuals like him did nothing short of saving the world from an unimaginable darkness.

They did something else, too, which in its own way has been just as important. They set a standard for bravery, sacrifice and selflessness for all Americans.

From time to time after our afternoon talk, Ed would drop by the newspaper to say hello.

He would grin and shake my hand with an enthusiasm that made me feel like I was his million-dollar lottery ticket.

Inevitably, at some point in our conversation there would come a moment when it would be like Ed and I were standing alone. Once again, for an instant, we would be back in that wordless place.

That place where only eyes can speak, and tears wait.

Airborne, dear friend. Airborne.