After 52 Years, Silver Star Winner Gets His Due

Fifty-two years ago Sunday, on a raw March night, Army 1st Lt. William F. Keene led his men out single file across a rural German field.

He was 22 years old, and it was his first night in combat.

“Face it, I was scared as hell, but somebody had to keep the men together,” he said.

They were an hour out when they hit the mines. One man’s foot tripped a wire, and the field erupted in explosions of “Bouncing Bettys,” designed to pop up and explode above ground, and underground wooden mines aimed at the feet.

In the dark and panic, Keene marshaled his men and led them crawling on hands and knees across the field, feeling gingerly for more wires. Then German infantry poured off a knoll up ahead. Keene fired every round he had in his .30-caliber carbine, killing two and wounding four German soldiers.

“All I could see was shadows, but you knew what they were. I just shot,” he recalled.

He rounded up the 18 living, unwounded men left in the platoon of 32 that had started out. They waited until the Germans were gone, then pressed on, mud-covered, and captured the small town that was their intended target at dawn.

Keene, 74 now and living in Huntington Beach, was recognized with four medals when he was discharged from the Army in El Paso, Texas, in 1946.

But they were thrust at him by an officer in a hurry, on his way out the door. He was never formally awarded the medals.

For five decades, they sat in a box in a closet, tiny reminders of a bloody battlefield.

Keene married an Army nurse he had met overseas, and joined the Huntington Park Fire Department. He retired as a captain 19 years ago. He and his wife, Evelyn, had three daughters and three granddaughters.

He would tell them about the war every once in a while, but he could tell they didn’t really understand. Every once in a while, he would take out the medals and polish them.

Seven years ago, Evelyn died and was buried at a veterans cemetery in Riverside County. There was no bugle call to play taps, no folded flag for the work she had done for her country.

Instead, there were tire tracks across the sunken graves, and toppled, vandalized tombstones of long-forgotten soldiers. Keene was horrified when he saw the disrepair. He spoke before Congress, successfully petitioning for $10 million worth of funds for veterans’ cemeteries.

Five years ago, he met his second wife, Barbara, at the home of a sick neighbor when Barbara brought the neighbor a plate of food. They went on a date, and talked and talked and talked, about the old days in Los Angeles County and about the war. On another date, he even casually mentioned the medals, and the fact that they had never been formally awarded to him.

After they married, Barbara wrote U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), asking if he couldn’t pin the two Bronze Stars for valor, the Purple Heart for knee injuries and, most importantly, the Silver Star for gallantry on her husband. A private ceremony at his office would be fine, she said.

In ceremonies Sunday at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center, the Army’s 63rd Regional Support Command marching band played loud and clear. Flags twirling, a company of soldiers snapped to attention as Maj. Gen. Robert A. Lame approached a gray-haired, trim older man, who saluted smartly.

Fifty-two years to the day after Keene led his platoon through the exploding field, his Silver Star was finally pinned where it belonged, above his heart.

Rohrabacher spoke of “thanks not just from this government, but from our generation to your generation. It was Bill’s generation that saved us, saved a nation and a world from imperialism, and Nazism . . . who preserved freedom and liberty, decency and dignity. It is our honor, all of us, today, to salute Bill Keene.”

Afterward, an ebullient Keene said “I almost got up and strutted.”

“This is beyond our wildest dreams,” said Barbara Keene.

After hearing the details of the long-ago battle and watching the ceremony, Keene’s granddaughter Marissa Mikaelian, 12, said, “It’s interesting. I never understood. He never really told me exactly what happened. But I understand today. He saved the country.”