By JAYSON JACOBY

Of the Baker City Herald

Fred Boyer saw the soldier’s guts strewn across the sand of a Normandy beach, a scene infinitely more ghastly than anything a filmmaker could ever concoct.

He heard the soldier’s dying cries.

And 60 years later Boyer hears them still.

He knows he could not have saved the soldier.

Even if Boyer had been a skilled surgeon rather than a sailor, it would not have mattered a whit.

Not while bullets from German machine-guns whipped past with their deadly whisper.

Not while rounds from German mortars raked the sand with their hellish steel hail.

And yet the guilt festers.

Boyer insists that he could have asked the soldier his name, his hometown, perhaps written a letter that would have served as some meager solace for the soldier’s family.

Boyer did not ask.

And so today, as this 82-year-old man remembers what he saw and what he heard and what he did not do on Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944, his eyes glitter with tears and his voice trembles.

Boyer sips from the tumbler of water he is clutching in his lap.

He breathes deeply, almost a sigh, before he resumes his story.

andquot;There were bodies floating in the water, soldiers with limbs blown off,andquot; Boyer says. andquot;But I remember this one soldier in particular. I’ve so long regretted that I didn’t get his name, find out where he was from.andquot;

And yet Boyer gave that soldier a name.

It’s the same name he bestowed on every man whose blood drenched that beach on D-Day.

Their name is hero.

andquot;The heroes are the guys I left on the beach,andquot; Boyer says. andquot;I got to go back on the ship where I had a dry bunk and three square meals a day.

andquot;I was lucky.andquot;

A rancher is what Boyer thought he would be.

Certainly not a sailor.

But then came Dec. 7, 1941.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Boyer was a student at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University).

He was studying animal sciences and range management just as you would expect of a young man who grew up on the ranch near Hereford that his grandfather homesteaded in 1882.

But then Pearl Harbor, and war.

andquot;Along with a lot of my friends I enlisted in the Navy Reserve,andquot; Boyer said.

He was allowed to stay in college until he graduated, in 1943.

In December of that year, after attending midshipman’s school at Northwestern University, Boyer was commissioned as an ensign.

andquot;I applied for PT boat duty, which was kind of the glamour service at that time,andquot; he said.

PT boats, also known as motor torpedo boats, were speedy vessels whose crews sank ships, laid mines, even rescued downed pilots.

A man named John F. Kennedy earned a pretty fair reputation commanding a PT boat.

But Boyer was not destined for glamorous duty.

Just before he was scheduled to depart for PT boat training in Rhode Island, his orders changed.

He was sent instead to Virginia, to learn how to pilot the decidedly unglamorous plywood boats designed to dump men and their weapons on beaches that bristled with German and Japanese guns.

The military was planning a little operation in the English Channel.

It was called Operation Overlord.

And it was the death knell for Hitler’s Third Reich.

Boyer knew nothing of world-changing invasions.

He was just disappointed about losing out on the PT boat training.

andquot;We were not aware at that time just what was in store for us,andquot; Boyer said.

But by mid-April of 1944, when Boyer sailed from New York aboard the Dorothea L. Dix (the ship was named for a Civil War nurse), he said he and his fellow sailors andquot;could only assume that something major was planned, and that it was an invasion of (Nazi-controlled) France.andquot;

By the end of May, Boyer knew for sure.

But he couldn’t tell anyone.

Boyer said he was one of two officers from his unit assigned to prepare daily updates to the plan for the invasion, which originally was scheduled for June 5 but was postponed for one day due to a storm at sea.

Once Boyer got his top-secret assignment, he wasn’t allowed to even leave the ship.

andquot;They didn’t want us out there, having conversations in the local bars or something,andquot; Boyer said.

Although he knew the details of the invasion, Boyer said even he was stunned by what he saw when the Allied armada sailed from England.

andquot;It wasn’t really until we were on the way to Normandy that we got a sense of the massive number of vessels,andquot; he said. andquot;Ships as far as the eye could see, horizon to horizon.andquot;

By about 2 a.m. on June 6, the Dorothea L. Dix was a dozen miles off the Normandy coast.

Boyer boarded one of the landing craft, each of which carried a crew of four sailors and 34 rifle-toting soldiers from the andquot;Big Red Oneandquot; the Army’s First Infantry Division.

Boyer was in charge of seven such boats.

andquot;One by one the boats came along the ship, and the troops climbed the (rope) nets and got on board,andquot; he said.

Neither the wait, nor the journey to shore, was pleasant.

The flat-bottomed landing craft were better suited to glassy seas than to the English Channel, whose surface on that morning was still being whipped into foamy whitecaps by lingering gusts from the storm that had delayed D-Day.

andquot;The seas were very rough, and a lot of the soldiers were getting seasick,andquot; Boyer said.

At 4 a.m. his group of seven boats headed for shore.

At first everything went as planned.

andquot;We hit the beach about 7 a.m., on schedule,andquot; Boyer said.

At 7:15, actually.

Boyer knows the precise moment because he kept the watch that was strapped to his wrist that morning.

The timepiece stopped at 7:15, the instant he leaped into the sea, and it hasn’t worked since.

andquot;I guess it wasn’t waterproof,andquot; Boyer said, chuckling.

His boat unloaded its soldiers without mishap, despite the constant stream of bullets from German machine-guns.

But as Boyer’s boat began its journey back to the Dorothea L. Dix, its plywood hull slammed into one of the submerged steel pilings the Germans had sunk in the seabed near shore.

The boat sank about 300 yards from the beach.

andquot;Fortunately the (piling) we hit didn’t have a mine on it,andquot; Boyer said.

Some did, and the crews of boats that struck those explosive boobytraps weren’t as fortunate as Boyer.

He and his three fellow officers started swimming toward shore.

It was, he said, about as easy as wading through a swamp of molasses.

Besides being pounded by waves, the sailors were encumbered by their bulky uniforms, designed to protect them against a possible poison gas attack.

andquot;We were not very maneuverable,andquot; Boyer said. andquot;It was each man for himself trying to get to shore.andquot;

The sailors weren’t exactly armed to the teeth, either.

As an officer, Boyer carried a .44 caliber pistol a pretty potent weapon in hand-to-hand combat, but Boyer was advancing against several thousand seasoned Germans.

andquot;(The pistol) didn’t seem like much compared with what we were up against,andquot; he said.

About halfway to shore, Boyer noticed that the storm of bullets sweeping the area suddenly seemed directed right at him.

andquot;I could hear the bullets whistling by me,andquot; he said.

Boyer, who was convinced a German machine-gunner had him in his sights, took shelter behind the hull of a wrecked landing craft.

Even today he’s not sure whether the boat was one of the seven he commanded, four of which sank that day.

andquot;I tried to get behind the motor for more protection,andquot; Boyer said. andquot;The bullets were knocking splinters off the plywood hull.andquot;

As he huddled there, shivering from the salty chill of the sea, and from the knowledge that at any instant the bullet that was his death could fly from a gun wielded by a man he would never see, Boyer prayed.

And in his mind’s eye he saw a face.

The hitch returns to Boyer’s voice and a single sob, soft as a sigh, escapes his lips.

andquot;I was thinking mainly about my mother,andquot; he said.

Her name was Elsie Boyer.

And she was home in Hereford, waiting for word of her son.

Not long after the machine-gunner shifted his aim to a new target, Boyer stood on French soil for the first time in his life.

He gathered a group of about 10 sailors from his unit.

Several were missing. They might have been drowned, or ripped by machine-gun bullets, or vaporized by a German shell.

Boyer never saw them again.

Then a squad of soldiers, who had taken shelter in the lee of a beachside cliff, arrived to lead Boyer and the other soaked sailors to the temporary safety of the soldiers’ position.

andquot;I had a lot of respect for those boys,andquot; Boyer said.

His plan was to hitch a ride back to the Dorothea L. Dix on the first available landing craft.

Boyer and his fellow sailors thought they had found their ride when a Canadian craft came ashore and offloaded its troops.

andquot;But just before we got to it it burst into flames, hit by a mortar shell,andquot; Boyer said.

By that time, late morning, the Allied invaders had suffered so many casualties that commanders postponed further landings for several hours.

andquot;We were stuck there,andquot; Boyer said. andquot;We did what we could to comfort the wounded, which wasn’t much. There was a major shortage of medical personnel.andquot;

It was during those hours of waiting that Boyer met the soldier whose name he never knew.

Although Boyer said he never felt that the invasion was failing, he knew it had not happened as military planners had intended.

andquot;We did not anticipate the heavy fire we were under,andquot; he said. andquot;And mistakes were made.andquot;

For example, Boyer said many landing craft that carried tanks and other vital weapons unloaded their cargo too far from shore.

The tanks and other vehicles sank.

Those tanks would have helped the advancing soldiers immeasurably, Boyer said, by crushing the barbed wire patches that slowed the soldiers’ advance across the beach, and by destroying some of the machine-gun nests and mortars that swept the beach and the surf zone with deadly showers of steel.

By late afternoon waves of landing craft resumed the invasion.

About 8 p.m. Boyer and his crew leaped aboard an American craft.

They spent two nights aboard the vessel, out in the English Channel, before the craft returned them to the Dorothea L. Dix.

On June 11, a Sunday, the ship docked at Portland, England.

The time was late morning, and the church service had just ended.

It was, Boyer remembers, a memorial to men from the ship who were missing and presumed to have died during the invasion.

Boyer was on that list.

Back in Hereford, his mother had received a telegram. It said her son was missing in action.

Boyer said his mother didn’t learn until a couple weeks later that he was safe.

But he said she always believed he was alive, even after the terrible telegram arrived.

From England the Dorothea L. Dix sailed to the Mediterranean Sea.

Boyer was there until December 1944, his mission transporting troops from North Africa to Italy and to Southern France, where the Allies were converging on Germany from all points of the compass.

In December the ship returned to New York.

Boyer flew home to Pendleton, where his family met him.

He had not seen Hereford, not walked through the pastures of the family ranch, since September 1943.

andquot;I was not aware of all the rationing that was in effect, of gasoline and many other things,andquot; Boyer said. andquot;That was the biggest surprise of coming home.andquot;

After two weeks’ leave Boyer returned to the Dorothea L. Dix. He spent the rest of the war in the tropical South Pacific, the polar opposite of the English Channel’s chilly gales.

His ship hauled troops from Long Beach and San Francisco to dozens of islands that American soldiers wrested from the Japanese.

Boyer missed what might have been the most dangerous mission: the invasion of Okinawa.

He was in a military hospital on Saipan, suffering from appendicitis.

Boyer was aboard the Dorothea L. Dix, sailing near the Philippines, when the atomic bombs pulverized Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.

He left the Navy in 1946 as a lieutenant, junior grade.

Boyer returned to Oregon, but he never again lived in Baker County.

His first job was with the Oregon State College Extension Service in Benton County.

He later worked for a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, then returned to Oregon in 1956 to open a Production Credit (later Farm Credit Services) office in Hillsboro.

Boyer worked in Hillsboro for four years, then was promoted to vice president and transferred to the company’s main office in Salem.

He lived in Salem until the early 1990s, when he bought a 40-acre tree farm near Molalla.

Last June, after macular degeneration left him legally blind, Boyer moved to his current home in Oregon.

Boyer’s first wife, Barbara, died in 1985. They had a daughter, Mary Boyer, who lives in Baker City.

War has not dominated Boyer’s life as it does for some veterans.

andquot;For a long time you kind of want to forget,andquot; he said.

His nephew, Kent Nelson, who took over the Boyer family ranch, said the interview Boyer gave the Baker City Herald was by far the most detailed history he had ever heard from his uncle.

andquot;Most of this is new to me,andquot; Nelson said while Boyer told his story in the living room of the Baker City home where Nelson lives with his wife, Anita.

andquot;Uncle Fred just never talked about the war.andquot;

But things changed for Boyer in 1997.

He got married, for one thing.

Boyer and his wife, Gerry, honeymooned in France.

But their trip had a dual purpose: While in France they also attended the wedding of the Nelsons’ son, Matt, who married a French woman.

During the trip Boyer re-visited Omaha Beach, strode across the sand he did not think he would ever see again.

andquot;I always wondered, with the surf and wind so heavy that day, if we hit the beach relatively close to where we were supposed to,andquot; Boyer said. andquot;By looking at the landmarks I confirmed that we were pretty close.andquot;

Boyer toured a World War II museum.

He visited a cemetery.

He wondered if the unnamed soldier, the man he never knew but always mourned, was buried there.

And wherever Boyer went he was treated as royalty.

andquot;There were standing ovations for Uncle Fred,andquot; Kent Nelson said.

But even as the French clapped their hands, thanking Boyer for risking his life to free their country, he was thinking not of himself.

He was thinking of others who didn’t risk their lives, but who gave them.

He was thinking of heroes.