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

DATE: MONDAY, June 20, 1994                   TAG: 9406200069
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO FU

First Fu baked from scratch a sponge cake with peaches and cream to share with fellow birthday celebrants John Warrick and Bob Clark, morning show producer and sportscaster, respectively, at radio station WFIR. After a quick language lesson from Fu, they sang together the birthday song in Chinese.

Fu then took flowers to the hospital for artist and arts patron \ John Will Creasy, who is gravely ill.

Between visits Fu was busy eavesdropping on people's accents in an effort to solicit participants for Saturday's Roanoke Times & World-News\ Local Color event, which she is helping to coordinate and will emcee. When she approached one candidate in a supermarket line because of what she thought was a British accent, it turned out he was from Brooklyn.

"It must have been just the few words," she laughed.

A textbook lesson

When it comes to training America's military leaders,\ D-Day is still the order of the day - and the role that Western Virginia soldiers played is the textbook lesson.

At the\ U.S. Military Academy, Col. Cole Kingseed boasts that, as the new chief of the academy's military history department, "I can teach what I want." So he pencils himself in to teach the two-semester "History of the Military Art," a required course for all cadets.

Why? Mostly so he can teach about D-Day.

"It's the single most important date in American history in the 20th century," Kingseed declares. "A single day's trial by combat tells more about an army and a nation than a generation of peace."

Another West Point professor uses D-Day as his closing lecture.

"Before I send them out to be lieutenants, I always use the example of Omaha Beach," says Col. Kenneth Hamburger. "Lieutenants and sergeants are the things that make the Army move. Generals and colonels can point it in the right direction, but the Army does not move until lieutenants and sergeants make it move."

His prime example? The way ordinary soldiers from\ the 29th Division - drawn largely from former National Guard units in Western Virginia - overcame stiff Nazi resistance, organized themselves and scrambled up the cliffs while Gen. Omar Bradley watched "helplessly" from his command ship.

"When you study it, you wonder how the hell any of them got off that beach," Kingseed says.