Friendship Rescues D-Day Veteran : Romance: Childhood sweetheart tracks down World War II soldier who had lost his way in life.

Martin Connolly made his way safely through D-day and the Battle of the Bulge, but lost his way in life. Now his childhood sweetheart has tracked him down, reunited him with his family and brought him home.

“I got curious. I think you always have that thing in the back of your mind,” Lorraine Breeden said. “I don’t know if you call it first love, but you always think, ‘What if?’ ”

She insists they’re just friends. But she visits him frequently at the veteran’s hospital where she helped him move in May.

Celebrating the D-day anniversary last week, they attended a hospital chapel service together, and he led the Pledge of Allegiance.

Before World War II, they lived around the corner from each other in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. They held hands on the way to the movies.

“We did the crazy things that teen-agers do, innocent things,” she said. “And then the war broke out and everything changed.”

Connolly, then 17, lied about his age and enlisted.

On D-day, he helped clear the beach of mines with a metal detector and a bayonet. In liberated Paris, he guzzled champagne and nuzzled women. At the Battle of the Bulge, he shot tanks with a bazooka.

Lorraine dated and married Dick Breeden, a Navy cook, before Connolly came home in 1946.

“I didn’t know what he was thinking and he was too shy to say anything,” she said. “As I told him many a time after I found him, if he had let me know how he felt, maybe things would have been different.”

Connolly re-enlisted the next year.

“I was young and I got the taste of the foreign girls so I went back in again,” he said with a rueful smile. “And what I was looking for was right where I left it, right here.”

Asked what he did after his discharge in 1965, the 68-year-old veteran pantomimed lifting a bottle to his lips.

By 1984, he said, he was sober.

That same year, Breeden’s husband died.

Breeden, now a great-grandmother, said she “wouldn’t change a minute of my life with him,” but she remembered Connolly and started looking for him in 1989.

It wasn’t until 1992 that she learned he was living in Indianapolis, being treated for back, hip and hearing problems.

She wrote. He called almost immediately.

“He said, ‘I understand you’re looking for someone from Wayland Street.’ And it was just like 45 or 50 years had never gone,” Breeden remembered.

Just two days later, he flew to Massachusetts and got reacquainted. He called his relatives for the first time in years.

“We haven’t stopped thanking her for finding our uncle,” said Joyce Foster, a niece.

Connolly’s health declined, so Breeden helped him move from Indiana to a Veterans Administration hospital in Bedford.

Today, Breeden rides a bus three hours each way to visit him four times a week. She bakes him cookies, does his laundry, urges him to keep walking and chides him to stop smoking.

“I think the world of him,” she said. “I’ll never marry him, but I’ll be his friend until the day one of us dies. No matter how many memories or family you have, it’s no fun to be alone.”