Retiring Georgia Congressman J. Roy Rowland went to France in June to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Rowland didn't get to France the first time until about six months after the invasion began, but he served with distinction and eventually won a Bronze Star for bravery. This summer was a special time for him and others of his generation to remember just what that war was like. In Rowland's case it was as a 19-year old PFC in General George S. Patton's "Hell on Wheels" 3rd Army.

"I guess the most overwhelming memory was just that you were so afraid all the time. Just living in constant fear-the potential that you were here right now, but an hour from now you might not be. After a while you sort of got... you never got used to it, the fear was still there... I don't know, resigned to it or something. You felt there's never going to be an end to this-very depressing."

Rowland got to France in December 1944, after a "miserable" 28-day voyage on a Liberty Ship. Two months later, he was in combat on the southern part of the front. The war was winding down, but for infantry soldiers like Rowland, the perspective was much different. "You never had the sense that the war was over in so far as you were concerned until you knew the shooting stopped."

Riding in half-track armored trucks or on the back of tanks, manning a .50-caliber machine gun, Rowland and his comrades chased the stubbornly retreating Germans and quickly learned some important lessons:

• Stay away from tanks. "I despised tanks. They always made so damn much noise and they always drew fire. The tankers were in the damn thing, and we were outside of it, you know. They were safe on the inside."
• Respect the German "88" artillery pieces, especially at crossroads. "They could do any damn thing with that gun. They would get off somewhere and zero that gun in on a crossroads. Then when you came to the crossroads, they'd shoot airbursts." A similar burst from a mortar wounded seven of the twelve men in his squad at one point. Rowland said he never learned if the wounded lived or died.
• Beware of heroes. "People absolutely despised Patton he was totally ruthless. He seemed to have no regard for individuals and their lives. I mean we outstripped our supply lines more than once... I sure despised him."

Ignorance, chance, dumb luck or the lack of it rule an infantry soldier's life. One of Rowland's friends was killed when a road gave way and the tank he was riding on flipped and crushed him. Another man tried to remove a hand grenade from his suspenders during a night patrol, but he snatched out the pin instead. "I think a lot of people got killed in freaky accidents like that."

Rowland's squad of rural boys once stumbled on some foreign troops hiding in a house. "We said, 'Who are you? and they said. 'Deutsche! Deutsche!' And I remember one of the guys with us said, 'Aw hell, those are Dutch soldiers, they aren't Germans. "

Rowland got his Bronze Star during a crossing of the Isar River in southern Germany. Companies A and B had gone across in 12-man assault boats the preceding night. "The fighting was really fierce. A lot of wounded. Some killed. And the rest were pinned down over there." Finally Rowland and four other members of his C Company were ordered to go across, reinforce the other troops and help with the wounded. "I'd like to tell you how I earned my Bronze Star, but to this day I'm not quite sure what happened."

Then there was what Rowland calls "the defining moment of my life, and I don't even recall the name of the town. We were in a small community and coming through that town early in the morning. The armored column was just sitting there, really quiet, and I began to hear some shouting way up the street there. A lot of people came around the corner and just filled the street. They were people who had been in this concentration camp and the German guards had left, so they just broke loose. It was a fantastic moment. They were shouting 'America! America!'. That has a big impact on somebody 19 years old."

Paradoxically, as the invasion went further into Germany and the war obviously was ending, the terror increased. "Right towards the end, when we knew it was close to being over, then everybody got real anxious, wondering, 'Am I going to make it 'til the shooting stops? Am I going to get killed here right at the end?"

After two months of occupation duty, Rowland was sent home for a 30-day leave before joining the anticipated-and much feared-invasion of Japan, but this was made unnecessary by the dropping of the atomic bomb. Like a lot of WWII vets, Rowland has no moral qualms about that, "I believe if it were not for the atomic bomb, I wouldn't be sitting here today."

--From interview in local newspaper, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer