As America remembers its veterans on Memorial Day 2013, Boothbay's George Whitten, 89, remembers Christmas, 1945 and the cold and uncertainty of a dark and foreign land.

Whitten was drafted in 1943 when he was just 19. He found himself leaving the maw of a huge Navy Landing Ship, Tank as he arrived on “Utah Beach” in France just two months after D-Day.

“They had cleaned it up but there was still all kinds of destroyed equipment laying around,” he said of the point where the Allied invasion of Europe began.

As American troops slugged their way across France on their way to Germany, Whitten was assigned to a combat engineering unit and spent the first few months filling potholes, building bridges and looking for mines.

The Army called Whitten an explosives expert. When asked if he was an expert, he said, “I guess so. I still got all my fingers and hands.”

Christmas 1944, as German troops attacked nearby U.S. Army in their last big push of the war (the Battle of the Bulge), he was sitting in a machine gun post over looking Luxembourg's Sauer river.

A man who lived nearby came up to the soldiers and wished them a Merry Christmas.

“I asked him how many children he had and he held up three fingers,” Whitten said.

Whitten said he reached in his pocket, pulled out three peppermint patties and three oranges. He offered them to the stranger. Ten minutes later, the man came back and invited Whitten and friends to Christmas dinner.

“It was exceptional,” Whitten said. “We had rabbit, squash, cheese. We had some sort of dessert, but I can't remember what it was.”

In the next few weeks, as U.S. Army forces raced to rescue units trapped in the crossroads town of Bastogne, Whitten and his crew were called to put a bridge over the Sauer river not far from the town of Heiderscheid.

It was an important crossing that would let the Americans relief troops into Bastogne through a sort of side door, he said.

The Germans army units thwarted their first attempt to span the river with a portable bridge. Then they decided to try to bridge the span using some other decking. He said they wanted to shove the new decking on to concrete pillars that were all that was left from an old bridge that had been destroyed.

Whitten explained his boss ordered him to wait for some new equipment to help lift the new bridge decking on to the old bridge pillars. Then the leader went inside a building for a cigarette.

Instead of waiting, Whitten said he and a truck driver figured a way to use the truck to lift the decking and shove it into place. It worked.

Moments later they shoved the second part of the bridge deck over the first unit and were able to span the river so tanks and other equipment could pass.

His boss, a lieutenant, wanted to punish him for not obeying his order to wait for the new equipment. Instead, the top brass put him in for a Bronze Star.

Although Whitten's war was over 68 years ago, the old soldier remembers coming home and fighting flashbacks. And he has some advice for the men and women coming home from today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he got home, Whitten suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. “I had it badly for years and finally shook it,” he said.

Whitten said the best thing returning vets can do is talk to other vets who have the same problem. When he came home, folks would say that those with problems were cowards. Not so, Whitten said. PTSD is a real problem caused by stress and anxiety.

What can the new veterans do about it?

“Find someone who has been there,” he said. “Talk to them. I know. I have been through all this …. I had a hell of a time too.

“Talk to someone and it will help.”