Carmine Rivera met Doris, his wife of 60 years, when she was an Army nurse and he was still recovering from his injuries in a hospital in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until 1995 that Carmine was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery under fire on Luzon.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

The big thing that Cheryl Wright Jasso remembers about the day the telegram arrived was that her mother burst out crying.

It was February 1945 and Cheryl, then 6, was with her mother at a hotel in Phoenix, where her mother was looking for work. Cheryl couldn’t fathom why her mom was in tears. “I kept asking, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’ No one would tell me.”

The next morning, while she was sitting in the bathtub, her mother said, “I have something to tell you.”

“As soon as she said that, I knew. I said ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.’ ”

But her mother spoke anyway, telling her that the love of their lives, Pvt. Paul Wright, of California, assigned to the 118th Combat Engineers of the Army’s 43rd Infantry Division, had been killed in action on Jan. 29 on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines.

In the weeks that followed, the family received some official correspondence, including the Purple Heart awarded posthumously, his burial flag and a letter signed by Gen. Douglas McArthur.

Revelations about how her father died and the actions of a Rhode Island man who tried to save him would only come years later, after Private Wright’s widow had died and Wright Jasso, who turns 70 this month, had gone years without answers.

CHERYL WRIGHT JASSO was born and raised in California. She moved to Wyoming 26 years ago, and now lives in Cheyenne, where she recently retired as an insurance agent. Over the years, she had tried many times to get more information about her father’s military service, only to learn that all the records had been lost in a fire.

But then, earlier this year, she expressed her frustrations to a friend. “She’s someone who loves mysteries,” Wright Jasso said about her friend. “She wanted to see if she could find out something. She began by reading all his letters to find out what battles he had been in.”

The quest led to Joe Bierend, of Yacaipa, Calif., a member of Wright’s unit in World War II, who happened to see an inquiry that Wright Jasso had posted this year in the 43rd Infantry’s newsletter. Bierend e-mailed to say he knew Private Wright very well, noting that Wright had taught him poker. He also described a Christmas card made from construction paper that Wright had sent to his family. The description matched the card Cheryl had received from her father and still kept in a box.

Then last month, Bierend passed along a 1995 article that he had clipped from a newspaper in Las Vegas. The article told of a Rhode Islander who had belatedly received a Silver Star for his attempts to save three men in his squad after coming under attack 50 years earlier in the Philippines.

For the first time, the story told Cheryl what had happened to her father. How the Rhode Island soldier had gone in three times, despite enemy fire, to save her father and the others. How her father had been shot between the eyes and died in the soldier’s arms. How the soldier had been shot in the face himself and spent years recuperating.

After reading the story, she knew she had to write to the Rhode Islander to thank him for his bravery. His name was Carmine “Gabby” Rivera, of Smithfield, Wright’s and Bierend’s staff sergeant.

CARMINE RIVERA, who turns 87 tomorrow, has had a varied career, starting with his decision to drop out of school at 16 to go to New York to work in an Italian restaurant. As an amateur boxer on Federal Hill, he had, by age 18, chalked up 9 wins and 2 losses. Years later, while living in California, he would become the West Coast president of the National Association of Government Employees.

Rivera, who lives with Doris, his wife of 60 years, at the Village on Waterman Lake in Smithfield, also has deep recollections of his time with the 11th Combat Engineers, fighting the Japanese in Munda, New Georgia, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and Guadalcanal.

But for Gabby, there is one day that stands out: the one 63 years ago when the Japanese machine gunners opened fire on him and his men while they were constructing a bridge in the Philippines.

Stripped to shorts and boots, with no helmet, Rivera dove to the ground when Japanese troops began their attack. When he looked up, he saw three men lying on the ground.

Rivera remembers that, without thinking, he ran across an open field to pick up the first of the men — “Pop” Gyer of Ohio, the oldest man in the unit, who had been hit in the shoulder.

“Since I was a boxer, I was in good shape, so I was able to carry him out to the rear echelons,” Rivera said last week. “When I got to the back I said, ‘Somebody get a jeep to take these guys to first aid.’ ”

Then, dodging more bullets, Rivera returned to get one of his two machine gunners, Frank Ridder of Newport. A bullet had hit one of Ridder’s hand grenades, ripping out half the man’s stomach, but Rivera managed to get him to the jeep 150 feet away.

Rivera then went back to rescue his other machine gunner, Wright. Wright had stood out, he says, because he was from California while most members of the outfit — a Rhode Island Army National Guard unit that had been federalized — were from Providence.

“I looked at him, and said, ‘Oh my God.’ He had been shot between the eyes. He was looking up at me while I took him in my arms. Then he died.”

As Rivera turned his head while holding Wright, bullets tore into his shoulder and neck, blowing out the roof of his mouth and part of his tongue and jaw. Despite it all, he managed to make his way back to the jeep, which brought him to a field hospital. He was so bad off that he was given the last rites by the unit’s chaplain.

But as Rivera lay in a corner where he had been put to die, an oral surgeon walking by the stretcher checked the stitches that had not been able to stem the bleeding in Rivera’s mouth. The surgeon put in his finger and found the source of the bleeding and was able to stop it.

“I owe my life to that man,” says Rivera, whose recovery would involve what at the time was unprecedented surgery to repair the roof of his mouth using skin from his arm. All told, he underwent 26 surgeries over the next 3½ years.

WHILE RIVERA received many awards and medals for his part in the various military campaigns, it was a half-century later, January 1995, before he received the Silver Star. Rivera says he learned years later that his commanding officer had started the paperwork to recommend him for the medal, but left it uncompleted when he was transferred.

As luck would have it, Rivera found his own silver lining in what happened to him while recuperating at his fourth hospital, in Pennsylvania. After coming back three days late from a two-day weekend pass, Rivera learned that the head nurse had written him up as AWOL.

A running battle ensued between the two until, six months later, they married.

When he finally received the Silver Star, in 1995, a newspaper story detailing his award and his deeds led the son of one of the men Rivera saved to call him and thank him. “He said he appreciated my saving his father because if I hadn’t done that he wouldn’t have been born,” says Rivera, who was living in North Providence when he received the medal.

But an even bigger surprise came two weeks ago when Rivera got the letter from Cheryl Wright Jasso.

WRIGHT JASSO had just finished reading the newspaper article that Bierend had sent her when she sat down to write Rivera.

“I was shaking by the time I finished reading the article for two reasons,” she wrote. “One, you said explicitly the manner in which my father died, and two, I could not get over the extent of your wounds in attempting to save him.”

“You put your life on the line to go in after him anyway and nearly paid the full price for doing so,” she wrote. “It was your attempt to rescue a dying man that left you with lifelong scars, and even though he died anyway, I will always hold you in the highest regard. I am so glad you are still with us so that I could tell you this and I hope you will remember my gratitude forever.”

Wright Jasso said she always adored her father even though she had only known him for a short time. She remembers his teaching her how to fly a kite, and the time he stepped into the bathroom in full uniform while she was in the tub and told her he was leaving her a gift. It was the last time she saw him.

“It was a live Easter bunny,” she said last week in a phone interview. “My aunt and uncle were not pleased.”

She had a lot of memories of her father, the Purple Heart and the official correspondence from World War II, but the article on Rivera’s Silver Star filled in many gaps.

“All my life I wondered if he suffered any at his death, or knew he was dying,” she wrote. “I gather from the article, that being shot between the eyes would preclude him from feeling much if anything, even if he was still breathing when you pulled him out. I always wondered if he said any final words, but I assume now that he was not able to do that, which I think is probably for the best, under the circumstances.”

“I’m very glad you were able to recover and make a full life for yourself. I hope you will keep in touch.”

rdujardi@projo.com