By Alan Burke
Sixty-four summers ago, Swampscott's Dr. Merrill Feldman was a young surgical technician in the 377th Infantry Regiment of the Army's 95th Division, fighting his way across the hedgerows of Normandy.
Sixty-four years is almost literally a lifetime.
"But I remember practically all of it," Feldman said yesterday, "from the time we committed in our first battle. To liberation. Very graphic events took place."
He remembers losing friends, he remembers attacking fortified positions and helping to free the fortified French town of Metz, where the Germans turned the impressive defenses of the Maginot Line against the Allies.
Last night, the French consul general in Boston made clear that his people remember, too. Celebrating Bastille Day, Francois Gauthier held a reception at Boston's Langham Hotel, where he bestowed France's highest military decoration, the Legion of Honor, on five Massachusetts veterans of the invasion of France.
Gov. Deval Patrick attended the ceremony.
Nodding to the five aging veterans, Gauthier told the crowd, "All of them contributed to the liberation of my country, and France will never forget what America has done for her."
"Everybody in Normandy remembers what happened," said French Army Capt. Mathieu Petitjean in an interview. "Even the kids remember."
Patrick earned sustained applause from the French participants by beginning his remarks in French. He thanked them for their assistance during America's Revolution.
"These men showed courage and honor," Patrick said, turning to the veterans, "to help our French brothers and sisters to defeat a great evil." In addition to Feldman, the French saluted James Gabaree of Newburyport, William Tucker of Harwichport, William Ulwick of Abington and retired Army Col. John Wessmiller of Chatham.
Originally from Dorchester, Feldman received the Bronze Star and Silver Star, while being wounded twice. The second time, he recalled prior to the ceremony, "I was wounded while trying to take care of a friend of mine." He refused evacuation and went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge as part of Gen. George Patton's Third Army.
Feldman had an added incentive to fight. He is Jewish. In Germany, his unit liberated one of the first concentration camps discovered by the allies.
"We didn't know much about the concentration camps," he said. But what they found shocked him and his fellow soldiers.
"We wanted to go into the next town and start shooting." Instead, they gathered the mayor and the local population, bringing them to the camp, forcing them to confront what had gone on.
It was the loss of friends, however, that motivated him the most and he spoke about it as if he could still see his friends standing before him.
"You got mad at the Germans if they killed your buddy," he said.
At one point, Feldman was among those chosen to hear one of Patton's pep talks.
"He came up with sirens going and pearl-handled pistols," he recalled.
The talk was liberally punctuated with foul language. Feldman retains an admiration for Patton's soldiering. The controversial general's attention to detail made it possible to swing his whole army into the rescue of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
"I saw the whole thing happen," Feldman said, "truck after truck after truck barrel-assing its way to the battle."
After the war, Feldman attended Harvard Medical School and became an oncologist and a teacher at Boston University Medical School.
"I became a physician to get involved in another war — the war on cancer," he said.
He married — wife Avis looked on as he stood ramrod straight to receive his medal — and had three sons and five grandsons.
"You appreciate life more," he mused on the personal impact of the war. "You appreciate family more after you've seen what happened in the camps during the Holocaust."
He remembers, too, the hope that after the misery and horror brought by the war there might be less of it in the future.
"After all we'd been through, we couldn't see how there would be more war," he said.
But the wars continued, he said, one after another, for all the days from then to now.
