Leo Heroux, right, relaxes before yesterday’s medal ceremony at Central Falls City Hall. At left is fellow D-Day veteran Wilson Delasanta, of Cumberland. Mayor Charles D. Moreau made the presentation on behalf of the French government.

The Providence Journal Bob Thayer

CENTRAL FALLS — Leo Heroux sat on a porch swing on the grounds of his residence at Forand Manor waiting for the time he would walk down the street to City Hall.

At 2 p.m. the mayor of Central Falls planned to bestow upon him the Croix de Guerre with palm on behalf of the French government for his part in the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach in Normandy.

Heroux, 84, was a machine gunner-bazooka man with a group of amphibious engineers whose job it was to clear a path 50 feet wide through mines and other obstacles before the first wave of infantrymen were to hit the beach. He was part of the U.S. Army 348th Engineers of the 5th Special Amphibious Brigade. He said he doesn’t like to talk much about that time. “What I saw I keep to myself. I can write it down but I don’t want to say anything,” he said.

But his eyes light up and a smile flashes across his face when he recalls a part of the war he never anticipated: The day he met Anne Marie Broeckx, the French school teacher he would marry.

Heroux was 19 and his commander had told him to go see the man from the village of Colleville-sur-Mer who owned the farm just in back of the invasion beach to tell him to move his cows because his men would be camping on his field. Heroux spoke with the man and struck up a friendship returning each night to talk.

It was a couple of days after the invasion when Heroux returned to the farm that he first laid eyes on Anne Marie. “She was young just like me. She had long hair. She came down the stairs,” he said. “It was love at first sight.” They were both 19 and they hit it off. He spoke a little bit of French. He returned each night to visit for about four months but then he was sent to Germany. He didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.

In Germany, he wrote Anne Marie a letter asking her to marry him but he never received a reply because by then he had gone to Marseilles.

Heroux returned to the United States and went back to live in his hometown of Central Falls. He wrote Anne Marie again asking for her hand. He never received a reply, but he did get a call from immigration officials in New York asking him to put up a bond for $300 in case his marriage did not work out and the government could send Anne Marie back home, Heroux recalls. Later on he received another call. It was from LaGuardia Airport asking where to send Anne Marie.

She arrived at Hillsgrove Airport (now T.F. Green). “She looked like a French woman. She had this big hat with a wide brim,” he said. It dipped below one eye, he recalls. “She looked beautiful,” he says.

They were married on Christmas Day at Notre Dame Church in 1947. Their first child was born in the city.

The following year they moved to France to live with Anne Marie’s parents at the farm in Colville. Heroux helped Anne Marie’s father run a driving school in Bayeux. He helped him milk the cows after work. Anne Marie resumed teaching.

They had three more children. Heroux became an unofficial guide for French groups taking tours of the landing beaches and later of the cemetery for Americans who had died in the war that was built in back of Omaha Beach, not far from the Colville farm. Leo Heroux was one of the veterans featured in Tim Gray’s Emmy Award-winning film D-Day + 62: Rhode Island Veterans Return to Normandy.

Heroux is quiet about the next part of his life. He and Anne Marie divorced in 1974 after 28 years of marriage. He returned to the United States. Anne Marie stayed in France. She is now in a nursing home there and is losing her memory, he said. He saw her a few years back when his granddaughter in France got married. Anne Marie did not recognize him.

Yesterday, just before he was to go to City Hall, Heroux went upstairs to his apartment to get his dark blue jacket and a baseball cap that says D-Day and has medals pinned to it. Three other men who were part of the armada that stormed the beaches on D-Day — Richard Fazio, 83, of Woonsocket, Frank Chomka, 84, and Wilson Delasanta, 86, both of Cumberland — would be there to cheer Heroux on when he received his medal.

tpina@projo.com