April 27
April 23, 2007April 25
April 25, 2007
Morgan City resident Gerald “Jerry” Dubois’s days usually begin around 5 a.m. when he cooks breakfast and listens to the news.
Later in the morning, he handles any necessary yard work such as edging or gardening. Instead of using a weed eater, Dubois uses homemade knives. Positioning himself on all fours, Dubois places the slant of the blade toward him, reaches for the grass and pulls it to the blade.
If it’s a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, Jerry is probably sitting in his living room talking to his girlfriend on the phone while they both enjoy Fox’s “American Idol.” Dubois likes watching the contestants react when they are turned down.
“Some of them guys or girls think they can sing,” Dubois says, laughing.
While Dubois’ days seem fairly normal, there is one challenge he has faced daily for more than six decades. Being blind.
He’s lived in the dark for 62 years. On Jan. 13, 1945, the Pfc. Dubois was positioned on the French side of the Rhine River. It was in this snowy, 30-degree weather on the river’s edge that his life changed forever.
Assigned to the 36th Amphibian Combat Engineers, his orders were to build bridges for “that one big push,” as he calls it. Late in the afternoon, Dubois’ company was waiting to begin building.
“We were safe, but the artillery was reaching us there. It was kind of a wooded area,” Dubois says, tapping his hands on a placemat on his kitchen table.
Dubois was standing in a wooded area eying the trees around him when he heard one.
A whistle. It was the sound of a shell traveling through the air. An .88 launched from a German cannon across the Rhine. The shell hit farther away from him. It was a routine occurrence for Dubois.
“It’s a big shell. It can make a crater,” Dubois recalls with a laugh. “When it whistles, you’re not in too much danger, but it makes you go down on the ground [because] you don’t know how far away it’s going to hit.”
While Dubois was beginning to get up, a fellow engineer a few feet away was already standing.
“When an .88 came over,” Dubois explains, “you were supposed to wait a little while [before standing up], because they usually send mortar shells behind it.”
The mortar shells did come. One landed in front of Dubois as the Louisiana native was on his hands and knees retrieving his gun. He was conscious and in no pain. Not even a headache. But things were different now. He was in complete darkness.
“…Blew both eyes out,” Dubois recalls. “One second I had 20/20 vision, the next it was gone.”
Ta ta ta tump..tump…Tump..thrump…Dubois’ hands tap the table in another rhythmic pattern.
“When the mortar shell hit, most of the shrapnel went over my head, but one caught me in the neck and tiny splinters in both eyes,” Dubois explains.
Lying on the ground, Dubois could hear .50-caliber machine-gun fire, which he thought was coming from the other side of the river: “It was all going over my head hitting the bushes on our side.”
Dubois’ medic called to him before clearing a slip trench-a man-made hole two feet in depth-and moving his patient there. Because he was not hurting, Dubois told his medic to attend to the man standing near Dubois before the mortar shell hit.
“That other guy was hollering like a pig,” Dubois recalls.
The medic looked towards the man, who other medics were approaching, before putting up the Red-Cross flag to temporarily halt fire. In accordance with a wartime agreement, gunfire ceased until the wounded were removed.
“They took me off with a stretcher,” says Dubois.
Out of the immediately impacted area, he was taken to a field hospital. Dubois: “And I started kidding around with the nurses. At that time I wasn’t in any pain even though I had a shrapnel that went into my neck from the mortar shell.”
He leans forward over the table to show where the shrapnel entered the right side of his neck.
Medical personnel cleaned his wounds and stabilized him before he was moved to Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania.
Although he was upset that he could no longer see, Dubois says he was glad he was still living: “That machine gun fire could have cut me in two.
“After I got out of there alive, I didn’t look back. I started enjoying life. I wasn’t worried about being blind. I was still alive,” Dubois says, pausing as the clock ticks and his hands move again: Ta ta ta ta tump…Ta ta ta ta tump…
At Valley Forge, Dubois’ back was cut in three places to clean the shrapnel’s paths. Both shrapnel and bits of his scarf carried with it were removed.
Then came the first eye: “They removed the left eye. It was infected.”
He was introduced to a cosmetic solution to replace this eye when he was given his first artificial eye. Two years later, the right one came out too.
“Did you ever see an artificial eye?” he asks before pressing his arms against the table to help himself up. He walks to the door at a moderate pace before stopping and placing his hand high and to the left of the handle. He then slides it down to find the handle before opening the door to retrieve the eyes.
“You can handle these,” Dubois says, returning a few minutes later. “They’re sterilized. I keep them in the solution. This is the right eye and this is the left one,” he says, setting them on the placemat at his left.
The “eyes” are like large contacts made of acrylic plastic in which an artist paints a blue eye in the middle of the white surface.
“I wear them all the time,” Dubois says. “I sleep with them. I feel more comfortable with them in than empty sockets.”
After leaving Valley Forge, Dubois continued his journey back into his old world.
“Before I could be discharged,” Dubois recalls, “the Army had a rehabilitation center for the blind veterans in Hartford, Conn., I went there for about two months.”
Here he learned how to move, use a walking cane and read braille. More than 60 years later, he no longer uses this reading form often.
“Today at the library for the blind in Baton Rouge, you can get all kinds of books…on cassette,” Dubois explains. “I’m reading one now. The name of it is The Last Mountain Man…And it’s really good.”
In the spring of 1945, Dubois was discharged from the Army. Back home, he moved in with his parents at their Front Street residence in Morgan City.
In March of 1945, two months following Dubois’ injury, the Americans cross the Rhine. The war ends in September.
Nearly 62 years later, Dubois sits in his recliner on a Saturday morning. Everything may still be dark, but Dubois still battles each day armed with a smile.
