A 91-year-old man lifts off in a commercial airliner bound for France and for a moment can imagine himself in the cabin of a Douglas C-47, preparing to leap into moonlit darkness.
Norwood Thomas was just a boy, really, the first time he arrived in Normandy. Now he is returning for the last time, once again mindful of his own mortality.
More than 100,000 Americans were there at the start of the campaign to retake Europe from Hitler. Only a few hundred are expected to return this week. Thousands more, many too frail to travel, will mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day back home.…show more content… When that didn't happen, like tens of thousands of others in the months after Pearl Harbor, the 19-year-old mechanic visited a recruiting office in his hometown, Durham, N.C.
"I want to be a bomber," Thomas told a recruiter, who then helped him fill out paperwork to join the Army Air Corps.
That night, Thomas told buddies he was going to "bomb those damn Japs back to eternity."
Instead, the Army stuck him in the infantry and sent him to Camp Claiborne, La., where in August 1942, an officer with a cocked hat, shiny boots and silver wings pinned to his chest strutted out in front of the men and shouted: "Who wants to have the first shot at the enemy?"
Thomas raised his hand.
Paratroopers - soldiers trained to leap into combat from airplanes - factored heavily in America's evolving war strategy, and the Army was looking for volunteers.
Thomas was among a dozen soldiers who survived the on-the-spot physical test that followed. A week later, the selectees were taken to Fort Benning, Ga., home of the Army's jump school.
The four-week program was notoriously difficult. Thomas remembers it like
