The ambassador of France draped a red ribbon around the neck of Quentin Aanenson and kissed him on the cheek, a tender act of gratitude for this Minnesota farm boy's role in a war he hated fiercely but remembered keenly.
He remembered comrades shot from the sky, whose awful deaths he witnessed, mute and helpless, from his cockpit. He remembered, too, the Germans he killed, decoys on the ground, all in a row."My bullets tore into them and blew things apart," he wrote his sweetheart, Jackie, the girl he met at a dance at Harding Field, La., and dated every day and sometimes twice a day until he was sent overseas.
"The emotional impact on me was terrible. My right hand and trigger finger wouldn't function. I couldn't grip the control stick."
France, looking for someone to symbolize its gratitude for what young Americans did half a century ago in the liberation, selected Aanenson to receive a high honor.
In a red-walled room of the ambassador's residence on Thursday, Bastille Day, Ambassador Jacques Andreani made Aanenson a commander of the Legion of Honor. Aanenson accepted, though he said others were more heroic.
Aanenson had gone to war on D-Day in a P-47 Thunderbolt and told what he saw and what he felt in solemn letters to Jackie.
But he couldn't tell her everything and for years couldn't tell their children or their grandchildren. So with the help of a son-in-law, a skilled video editor, he made a three-hour film of his war memories.
In it, he read aloud the letters he wrote Jackie. She, in a soft voice still toned Southern, read aloud her letters to him.
The film was intended for their children. But war comrades urged him to give it to television. It was broadcast by PBS last month and brought thousands of admiring letters to Aanenson, who had made a postwar career as an insurance executive in Bethesda, Md.
He had flown 75 combat missions over France. Three times, his cockpit burst into flames. He was wounded and listed as missing in action. He once landed with 50 shrapnel holes in his plane.
The day after he was reassigned to ground duty, two planes he had flown - Rebel Jack and Rebel Jack II, both named after Jackie - were shot down, both pilots killed.
The story tumbles from the bundles of letters, some terrible, some sweet:
- "Dear Jackie: Before every mission, as I'm climbing into the cockpit, I whistle the first bar of the air corps song and kiss the ring you gave me. It seems to do the trick because I'm still flying. Johnny Bathurst carries one of his baby shoes with him. One of the other fellows recites a little poem."
- From a letter he decided was too grim to mail: "I live in a world of death. I have watched my friends die in a variety of violent ways. Sometimes it's just an engine failure on take-off, resulting in a violent explosive crash. There's not enough left to bury. Other times it's the deadly flak that tears into a plane - if the pilot is lucky, the flak kills him."
- Another encounter with German troops: "Some just crumpled to the ground, but the tremendous impact of .50 caliber bullets at 120 rounds a second threw most of the bodies several yards. I got sick when I landed."
- A colleague's death: "I watched him frantically trying to disconnect everything and bail out. I was just a few feet away from him, but he was too low. He waved to me an instant before his plane crashed into the trees and exploded. Debris flew everywhere - I barely got through it. To this day I can still see the expression on his face as he looked directly at me before crashing. In that instant, he knew he was dead."
- Home on leave, March 1945: "I was wearing my .45 automatic in a hip holster, and I probably looked as tired as I felt. The stationmaster spotted me. He then said to the crowd at the gate, `Let the captain through, he just came in from the war today.' The people started applauding. I almost felt guilty being alive."