Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 13, 1994                   TAG: 9406140251
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

NOW EVERYONE KNOWS SLAUGHTER'S A D-DAY HERO

It wasn't always that way.

Bob Slaughter is back home in Roanoke, one of the most famous old soldiers in the world at the moment.

He's the one with the wide, creased face and the rolling drawl who over the last two weeks told the story of D-Day to the globe's biggest media.

He's the still-strapping 6-foot-5 vet who got Omaha Beach sand in his shoes with President Clinton on the 50th anniversary of the invasion of France.

Saturday night, he was welcomed home, with flags unfurled, and his Roanoke County neighbors in red, white and blue trampling the thick turf of his suburban front yard to say how proud they were of him.

They had seen him on the networks, in Newsweek, in People or in the Washington Post's Style section profile. They were absorbing the fact that Bob, the ordinary guy down the street, had a bigger story in him than they knew.

In powerful words, he has told the world what it was like to be a teen-aged sergeant thrust on that beach in 1944, surrounded by drowning, bleeding brethren, many of them the officers who were supposed to lead him.

"All of those years I worked with you at the paper, I had no idea," Karen Skeens told Slaughter. She works at the Roanoke Times & World-News, where Slaughter was composing room foreman until he In powerful words, Slaughter has told the world what it was like to be a teen-aged sergeant thrust on that beach in 1944, surrounded by drowning, bleeding brethren, many of them the officers who were supposed to lead him. retired seven years ago.

Even his middle-aged sons didn't know what hell he lived through. They've watched their formerly stoic father choke up on national television as he told about the men who died.

"My brother and I really didn't know much about this," Warrenton businessman Bob Slaughter Jr., 46, said. "He never talked about it. In fact, he wouldn't talk about it."

When the boys were growing up, Bob Jr. said, "he wouldn't go to a war movie. He wouldn't watch it on television."

The day after their 69-year-old father walked that beach with Clinton and was interviewed by Dan Rather, Bob Slaughter's boys talked by phone.

"I had no idea," Goochland County bank employee Hunter Slaughter, 42, told brother Bob.

His dad's neighbors were amazed, too, at the exposure he got: C-SPAN, the Los Angeles Times, The Discovery Channel.

He seems embarrassed by it. He told them there were men who suffered so much more, like the guy whose legs were left nearly meatless by shrapnel but still made it back to France last week. "They're your real heroes. I've got no problems. I walk 2 1/2 miles a day."

Tired as he was, he stood on his lawn as darkness fell and told his friends what it was like in France:

How nice Clinton was, jumping onto the back of a vehicle and hanging onto a rail so the vets could have the seats.

How the French people opened their homes to them and washed and ironed their clothes. "We have done more for Franco-American relations in these 11 days than lend-lease or anything else."

For nearly 40 years, Bob Slaughter immersed himself in work. He trained as a newspaper printer after the war, relieved not to be one of the many jobless veterans.

He became a Little League coach, a strict dad, a Baptist.

In the fall of 1973, he filled out a standard biographical form for the newspaper library. Under military service, he wrote simply: "5 years World War II, 29th Infantry Division, staff sergeant, England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway.

Not a word about D-Day.

About a dozen years ago, he started going to reunions of the 29th and becoming active in its veterans' association. He began to talk more about the war and to push for a D-Day memorial to the Western Virginians who served and died that day.

"I think all of that was probably therapy for him," said Bob Jr.

Bob Slaughter wrote his memoirs, now being circulated among publishing types in New York, and he helped other vets get their stories down on paper. His wartime recollections appear in two hefty D-Day histories by English scholars.

He figures all that led historians to refer the media to him. Then the White House picked him for the beach walk.

Locked inside Slaughter all those years, the words pour fiercely from him now.

In the Post, he talked about the early hours of D-Day: "There is no way, really, to explain the terror of that morning. Pinned down on that wide beach with bullets flying everywhere and not a single weapon that would fire. You felt like a cornered animal, like a piece of meat on a giant plate, your bladder out of control and dying men screaming and no place to hide."

His misery didn't end there. He fought his way through France, Belgium, Holland and into Germany. He was wounded twice. His father, only in his 40s, died while he was over there. It was a while before Slaughter knew it.

He speaks openly about being scared and seasick, about vomiting in his helmet, about hesitating to jump off that boat ramp into the pounding surf and the German artillery, and nearly shooting his foot off as he stumbled up the beach. He's not ashamed to say he eventually had mercy on some of the young German soldiers, just frightened boys like himself.

Now he returns to the slow lane of Roanoke and to that monument he's still fighting for. "People aren't interested," he said Saturday, disgusted. "We've got to have some help." He wants someone to step forward and offer a place for it and the money to build it.

He's irked with Roanoke Mayor David Bowers. "The last time I talked with Bowers, he said, `You're way down on my priority list.' "

Slaughter and the mayor of St. Lo, France, a town liberated by the 29th, are eager to set up a sister city relationship with Roanoke. Slaughter said Bowers was cool to that, too. "He just brushed me off and treated me rude."

Bowers could not be reached for comment Sunday night.

Bob Slaughter's wife, Margaret, picked him up at the airport. He was gone 11 days, the longest they'd been apart in 47 years of marriage.

There were times when she wished she had gone with him, as she did for the 45th anniversary of D-Day.

Instead, she stayed home and took dozens of phone messages for him from both friends and strangers - a pilot from the Persian Gulf War who wants to meet him, a young North Carolina man whose father was in the 29th and who wept after seeing Slaughter on television.

Margaret Slaughter filled three or four videotapes of his appearances and other D-Day shows for him to see.

It was years before even she learned why he had nightmares when they were newlyweds.

Bob Jr. found out at a 29th Division reunion last year that his dad wasn't the only vet to stay quiet for so long. "They all said the same thing - `We just didn't talk about it.' "

Neither of Bob's sons were in the military and they're still trying to imagine what he went through.

A few days ago, Margaret Slaughter said, "The younger one called and said, `Mom, how old was Dad when he went in on D-Day?' He said, ` Nineteen?' "

Actually, Bob Slaughter was a seasoned GI by then. He joined the National Guard at 15 and was at war as a squad leader before some of his pals back home were even out of high school.

"You know," Hunter Slaughter said Sunday, "we're lucky to be in this world."