Hilton Head WWII vet, his loving guide, ready for Honor Flight

When he came back to Chicago after the war, he hung the jacket in the back of an attic closet.

With its medals, ribbons and insignia, the jacket told the story of his tour in Europe. He’d landed in France two months after D-Day, served in a field hospital unit. But he stowed those memories in a place he rarely went.

“An Eisenhower jacket, they called (it),” Walter Okrongley said Thursday morning as he sat at a table in his Indigo Run home on Hilton Head Island. He reckoned he could still fit into it though he joked it might be a bit snug.

Earlier in the morning, he’d flipped through a postcard book on the table. The book held images of people and places from the war and, on the back page, his “service itinerary” — he’d been in England on July 4, 1944, spent Labor Day in France and celebrated Christmas in Holland.

“I can’t read what I have here,” he said, referring to the itinerary, and how macular degeneration has eroded his eyesight.

Okrongley, a Hilton Head resident since the late 1990s, is legally blind. On Friday he’ll take an Honor Flight from the island to Washington, D.C., where he’ll tour the capital and reflect on his service with fellow veterans. That flight was arranged by Honor Flight Savannah, which worked with the national Honor Flight Network to plan the trip.

Truly, though, the trip is possible because Okrongley is able to bring his wife — who now serves as his eyes.

Okrongley first found out about the Honor Flight program — which flew over 20,000 veterans last year — through his volunteer work at Hilton Head Hospital. At the facility, he visits with patients and makes sure they’re comfortable, similar to some of the work he performed after the Normandy landings with the 108th Evacuation Hospital which later became the 56th Field Hospital.

The hospital unit was attached to the Third, Seventh and Ninth Armies, Okrongley said, though it primarily stayed close to Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army.

Okrongley and his comrades bounced around between France, Holland, Belgium and, later, Germany. He assisted chaplains and would scout new locations for the hospital as the unit advanced. He performed “first aid work” — one of the combat units he supported had a “100 percent casualty rate,” he said — and he drove officers around in a Jeep.

He was in a Jeep when a German V-2 rocket landed in a field as he was driving along a road. He remembers the sputtering sound as the rocket’s engine quit and gravity pulled the flying bomb earthward. The concussion sent his Jeep skidding sideways.

And he was in a Jeep as he drove a major — a psychiatrist — to pick up a shell-shocked soldier.

But there are better memories.

He and a buddy exchanged national anthems with French villagers in a small tavern north of Brest. They shared a common cause, he said, if not a common tongue.

And he remembers the Hawthorne family, with whom he was billeted for a time in England, and how they gave him their weekly egg rations. When he found out they were only allowed one egg per person per week, he insisted they stop.

When he learned of the Honor Flight program, he was hesitant. He feared his failing eyesight would complicate the trip. He worried about being able to read inscriptions on monuments and negotiate steps.

“That would occupy his mind, because he’d be worried about his safety,” his wife, Anne Marie Okrongley said. “Basically my job is to make sure he sees the steps, sees the obstacles he might not see in advance.”

Her presence will allow him to be present in the moment, she said.

“I think the Honor Flight will be an opportunity to share our mutual experiences,” he said, adding that he didn’t know how many veterans would be on the flight, or in which wars they’d fought.

He didn’t talk much about the war when he came back home to Chicago.

“I didn’t want any reminders,” he said, remembering how he’d hidden away the Eisenhower jacket in the attic closet.

“Now I wish I had that jacket back.”

It’s something he’d like to share with his grandchildren.

This story was originally published June 9, 2016 at 4:35 PM with the headline "Hilton Head WWII vet, his loving guide, ready for Honor Flight."