YORK, Pa. — One of the great survivors stood proudly at his door, which was decorated with American flags.

He looked out onto another day, the sun breaking through the clouds.

His face lit up through all its years.

“I’ve got the handiest apartment around,” Dale Chapman said.

Just a few feet away are the main office and entrance to his complex in Lebanon. He takes walks along the railed hallways six and seven times a day. He loves to sit on the outdoor bench to greet everyone who passes by.

His eyes are not good, so he spends his time praying, fixing simple meals and looking back through the grand view of his life. He is one of the last still able to describe the Great Depression and serving in World War II. He’s not the least bit content with the ongoing restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic, but he is surviving well enough, yet again.

He turned 100 last month.

Always, another Memorial Day follows quickly.

“A day at a time … I can’t complain. I thank the good Lord I have good kids. If I didn’t have that my life wouldn’t be worth a nickel,” Chapman said.

“I’m proud of my life.”

From farmer to World War II soldier

His story is one of how a world war gave him his greatest gifts and losses, then shaped his work and faith for the rest of his life.

Those like him are leaving ever more quickly now, hastened by COVID-19 and its devastating effects on the elderly. Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, only around 300,000 remain. Of those veterans, 24,000 or so reside in Pennsylvania.

They are a lasting testament to overcoming great obstacles and to self-sacrifice. Is it any wonder so many own the fortitude to push on through a virus pandemic 75 years later?

Chapman shrugged when asked about such things recently, describing how his life’s journey truly began when it was finally time to leave the family farm. That work with his brother and parents in small-town Ohio was all he had known — cutting corn and threshing wheat by hand, plowing fields with mules and cleaning chicken coops.

Their home was lit by kerosene. There was no electricity.

He was too valuable of a worker to even finish grade school, and he still laments never learning to read well. The war-time Army would be his escape at 21.

His first blessing came shortly after when he was introduced to his future wife, Margaret, while stationed at Fort Indiantown Gap. They ended up marrying a few days before he was sent overseas.

Chapman quickly excelled as a military truck driver, which turned into one of the most hazardous jobs. He describes the nerve-wracking existence of driving supplies, including gasoline, through France to help satiate Lt. Gen. George Patton’s Third Army front, which had raced toward the German border.

Chapman’s duties aligned with the famed Red Ball Express, the 24-hour-a-day convoy of 6,000 supply trucks that navigated hundreds of miles of narrow, rock-filled roads from the beaches of Normandy to the front lines — the route marked by red balls so the drivers wouldn’t get lost. The crucial operation gained notoriety as most of its drivers were African-Americans, marking the first time the U.S. Army desegregated in World War II.

Their trucks constantly took on sniper and aerial fire while dodging land mines. They had to avoid flipping off the sides of those crude roads while staying awake in the middle of the night. They quickly became make-shift mechanics, forced to fix anything that went wrong in the moment.

Protection came only from sandbags bolstering the truck floorboards and ride-along machine-gunners watching for the enemy.

Chapman said the shattering, overwhelming noise of it all still reverberates in his mind — rumbling truck engines, detonating bombs, gunfire flashing from behind his head.

“I was nervous all the time. Those guns were so noisy they’d shift the whole truck.

“I was very lucky,” he said. “I prayed a lot for protection.”

Those supply runs eventually led him into the Battle of the Bulge, which has been called “the greatest American battle of the war.” It also was the bloodiest.

Chapman kept driving during those six frozen weeks of fighting in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest as 1944 turned into ’45. In Adolf Hitler’s final, desperate offensive, German forces inflicted 75,000 U.S. Army casualties — some friends and acquaintances of Chapman.

Record-breaking cold amid deep snow was nearly as dangerous to the exhausted men on both sides.

The relentless bombing and gunfire ripped through the land like a tornado, snapping trees into shards, flattening most everything in sight.

The scenes would forever sear the survivors.

Chapman broke up a bit this week when talking about those he lost during the fighting. He said he couldn’t remember many of the details of the battle anymore.

All he can offer is to admit how fortunate he was to survive. In the months that followed he said he helped liberate prisoners of war and began policing Germany’s war-torn population after its Nazi leaders surrendered.

All the while, he sent his monthly $22 U.S. Army check home to his new wife.

Bringing the Army back home

Chapman’s return to America in 1945 included a train ride from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania. He and Margaret would move briefly back to Ohio before returning to Lebanon for good. They raised three daughters, one from Margaret’s first marriage.

And he would never farm again. Instead, he always seemed to have two or three jobs at once, most involving truck driving. He seemed to be able to fix anything, run any kind of equipment, take a car engine apart and put it back together.

Those parts of the service never left him.

Daughter Wendy Morrissey, now 66, remembers living for those late-afternoon rides with her father as a kid, excited to blow the horn as long as they wanted along the country roads.

“We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but we had whatever we needed,” she said. “We never bought anything on credit, he saved for what he bought. He valued money and where it went.”

Chapman playfully interrupted. “I never had trouble getting a job.”

He kept working, sure enough, after retirement, which included bagging groceries and cleaning at Weis Markets.

His daughter said he mowed lawns into his 90s and only gave up his driver’s license a few years ago.

His faith has been pressed, for sure. His wife died nearly three decades ago, then his stepdaughter.

He cannot manage the Memorial Day picnics anymore they all fondly remember. He could never bear to watch a war movie.

But he still finds the light in life.

He looks forward to going out to restaurants again and to warmer, freer days to sit on the bench just outside his door and talk to whoever is willing.

He perked up describing his surprise 100th birthday celebration in the apartment parking lot. The mayor of Lebanon read a proclamation and a fire truck blared its siren.

They saluted the war hero who never considered himself one.

“They were standing there waving at me. That,” he said, smiling again, “was the best, the best I ever had.”

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Information from: York Daily Record, http://www.ydr.com