Heroes among us

When the attack ended, the Army soldier discovered he wasn't the same. Last month, nearly 66 years later, Gale, 93, received the Purple Heart for hearing loss sustained during his military service.

"I didn't want to bother," he said, referring to the decades that passed without the medal. "And then I said, 'Why not?' "

Born in New York City, Gale was drafted in Baltimore in March 1941. He said his first assignment was with the 74th Coast Artil lery Regiment in Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Va., and he served with the 896th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion.

Recalling the attack, Gale said, "I was visiting a gun site on the docks of Algiers, and while I was there a German air raid occurred. The man who took care of a machine gun was away on leave. They had two gun revetments, one for a 40-millimeter gun, a big revetment, and a small one for a machine gun."

He recalls that he was asked to take over the small machine gun in place of the soldier who was on leave.

"In that same incident, at the revetment for the big gun, two of the boys got killed," Gale said. "I was lucky."

But Gale wasn't entirely lucky. "When I went back to my assignment at headquarters," he said, "I just couldn't hear." He was told his hearing would come back, but it did not do so in his left ear, he said. "I knew that something was wrong, but I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to be a second-rate soldier," he added.

A couple of years ago Gale decided he wanted the Purple Heart as a matter of pride in service to his country, and to pass along to his family. Kerry Slattery, social worker at Haverhill Crossings, the senior living community where Gale moved after living with his daughter for a time in Plaistow, N.H., reached out to US Representative Carol Shea-Porter, a New Hampshire Democrat, for help with the process. "He couldn't get through the red tape," Slattery said.

Shea-Porter's inquiry to the National Personnel Records Center was referred to the Department of the Army, which verified Gale's entitlement to the Purple Heart. The congresswoman presented Gale with his medal April 6.

"She was wonderful," said Gale's daughter, Pat LeBlanc. "The family was most appreciative of everything she did for him."

"My family has always served this country in the military," Shea-Porter said in an e-mail. "Both my grandfathers fought in World War I and my father served in World War II. I was a military spouse and my husband served during the Vietnam era. They all sacrificed for our country and I have always respected and appreciated our veterans. I was honored to fix an oversight and to present Mr. Gale with his Purple Heart more than 65 years after he was wounded."

Gale, who has a grandson and two great-grandsons, doesn't consider himself to be a hero. "I am nothing," he said.

"You gave a lot of time and a lot of you," Slattery told him during a recent interview with the Globe. "You are a hero."

Gale's hearing problem has grown worse as he has grown older. "It's bad," he said. "It's embarrassing."

Gale, who rose to the rank of master sergeant, said he spent 20 years as a soldier, including a tour in Korea, and 20 more as a civilian administrator at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. "All I did was change hats," he said.

From Algiers the war took Gale to the Italian island of Sardinia and to southern France. When he was in Toulon shortly before the end of the war he and another soldier were invited to a dinner dance. They were early and waited in a garden, and two women walked past. "They came back and they sat across from us," Gale remembers.

One of them caught Gale's eye and held his attention for the rest of the evening. She was pretty, and he noticed that she was looking at him, too.

He recalls, "Finally I got nerve enough to go over and say 'Would you dance with me?' She said yes. The dance was a tango. I always say to myself that it was because of that dance that she said, 'I will marry that guy.' "

Gale and his French sweetheart, Jacqueline, were married in Marseilles in September 1945 and honeymooned in Spain. They moved to the United States in 1948, he recalls. "It was a good marriage, a wonderful marriage," Gale said. After his wife died in 2003, he moved north from Maryland.

He plays golf a few times a week with his son-in-law, Ray Clermont, at Granite Fields Golf Club in Kingston, N.H. "I've gone from a 7 handicap down to about 30 now," Gale said. "But I'm not complaining, at my age."