CEDAR FALLS - Guy Wray and his comrades the U.S. Army's 36th Texas Division had just crossed the Rapido River in Italy in January 1944, and into the jaws of certain death.

"We got across the river and spotted 15 German tanks," Wray said. His 57mm anti-tank gun crew, and other elements of the division, were clearly outmatched. He radioed back to his commanders "I said 'We're going to get chewed up if we don't get back across the river.'"

They agreed, and back across the Rapido they went, as the division was under fire from the Nazi armor.

"We got across the river and I heard the sounds of someone crying for help," Wray said. It was an American soldier.

Wray left his gun crew. "I said, 'OK, dig your gun in here,'" and he went back to see if he could help the soldier. He found him. He had been blinded by a white phosphorous shell. "I carried him on my back a half a mile to an aid station," and safety, Wray said.

His gun crew wasn't as fortunate. "By the time I go back to the gun, they had taken a direct hit." Two of his four fellow crew member were killed.

It is at that point of the story that Wray still chokes up, even breaks out in tears, some 65 years later. Had he remained at his post, he would have been killed too.

"The Lord says, 'We're going to save your life here this time.' I don't have any control over it."

Wray won the Bronze Star for his actions that day. He felt he scarcely deserved it, given his friends' fate. "It wasn't what I was looking for," he said.

Wray, his crew and the Texas Division in that action were part of what has been described as one of the worst defeats an American force suffered during World War II. The action supported the American beachhead at Anzio, but the actions of American commander Gen. Mark Clark were called into question. It prompted a book " Bloody River," by Martin Blumenson in 1970.

It was just one episode in three years of combat Wray saw in North Africa, Italy and France with the 36th Texas Division, serving with both the U.S. Fifth and Seventh armies.

However, the battle on the Rapido wasn't the worst fighting Wray and his comrades endured. That occurred not even a month earlier, during the Battle of San Pietro.

Of the 1,100 members of the Texas Division that joined in the assault on the town, only 171 came out alive and unhurt. Wray was one of them.

"That was rough," Wray said. The Americans took the town, but at a heavy cost, especially to the Texas Division.

The battle was immortalized in a 1944 World War II documentary by legendary Hollywood filmmaker John Huston, then serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Wray is seen in that documentary, known for its gritty realism and unsanitized combat scenes, as he carries a wounded captain from another company to help.

The captain, Henry T. Waskow, later died. His death was chronicled in a column by revered war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Many consider "The Death of Captain Waskow" to be Pyle's finest journalism of the war.

The troops loved Pyle, Wray said. He recalled an instance where he and other troops kept their cover until they realized the staccato clicking sound they heard was that of Pyle's typewriter and not of an enemy weapon. He was filing a report for the Stars and Stripes newspaper. He recalled Pyle, like a lot of GIs, could never warm himself rainy, muddy spring in central Italy. When Pyle was killed in the Pacific near the end the war, those who knew him in the Texas Division felt the loss.

Wray partcipated in the Allied landings at Salerno and the long, muddy, bloody battle for Monte Cassino, serving along side units like the National guard's 34th "Red Bull" infantry division, which included the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry, the "Ironman Battalion" now headquarted in Waterloo.

The Americans finally took Rome on June 6, 1944, the same day Allied troops landed at Normandy in the D-Day invasion. Wray still has a sketch of himself an Italian artist drew for him.

From Italy, Wray's unit was dispatched to southern France and helped liberate that country. Up to that point, Wray was largely uscathed, only grazed by a sniper's bullet in Italy. It was in France that he received his closest call, in Strasbourg.

Then assigned to the U.S. 7th Army, Wray, who finished the war as a platoon sergeant, was about to post guard for the night. He had finished warning that the Germans were only about 300 yards distant and to keep a clear eye to keep them from flanking an encircling their position. Then he heard shell fire from a German Tiger tank. "We heard them fire enough we could tell if it was going to be close," he said. "I yelled, 'Look out' "

The shell hit right beside the door frame of the building they were in. A piece of shrapnel pierced his leg behind the kneecap and came out the other side. Unable to walk, he said, "I dragged myself 15, 20 feet across the floor to where this other kid was," also wounded. "I heard someone yell 'Medic!' and I passed out."

He woke up about a day later in a Paris hospital. He was spared again - barely - because he had turned his body in reaction to the shell approaching. "The doctor said, 'If you hadn't gotten turned, that would have blown your leg off, hit you right in the knee." As it was, he underwent months of rehabilitation.

"I had to learn to walk all over again," he said.

He never found out what happened to his friend who was also hit in the blast. But he knows one thing for sure. "Another five or six inches and I wouldn't be here," he said.

After rehabilitation and a ground assignment to the U.S. Eighth Air Force, he asked to be returned to his unit. He got there a few days before the war ended.

Wray was one of four brothers, natives of Lenox, who served in World War II - three in Europe and one in the Pacific. A fifth brother served in the Korean War. The family received a letter from then Secretary of State Henry Stimson, thanking them for their sons' service.

Wray came to Waterloo-Cedar Falls after the war. He Wray worked at Clay Equipment Corp. in Cedar Falls, John Deere and Schield-Bantam Corp. in Waverly.

He and his wife, Marlys, will mark their 61st wedding anniversary Sept. 14. They have three children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The Wrays' service is not yet over, Guy's and Marlys' son Ron, 58, with 40 years in the military and two tours of duty in Vietnam, now serving with the Iowa Army National Guard at its helicopter facility on Big Rock Road, is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq later this year.

Contact Pat Kinney at (319) 291-1484 or pat.kinney@wcfcourier.com.