Following Remy to the village of Villers-Bocage where my father crashed, Tim's driver's-side windshield wiper broke. When we stopped in the little town for lunch he fixed it with a plastic tie-wrap he found in the trunk. Good man, Tim!

During lunch Remy told us that the town council wanted to put up a plaque commemorating my father. He telephoned to let them know we were in town. After lunch we drove a short distance to the crash site, and two members of the town council were there to meet us. The two middle-aged men looked as if they had been sent by central casting - sturdy Normandy farmers, red-faced in the chilly air. The two villagers and Remy kept up rapid-fire conversation, very little of which I could catch. They really liked to talk.

The crash site was a small grassy lane on a hillside by a curve in the road. A German lorry containing soldiers had pulled into the lane hoping to take cover in the overhanging trees This truck was the target of my father's flight of four P-47's when his ship was hit by flak. His plane continued down and crashed into the truck and exploded. The Frenchmen showed me where he had been buried by the townspeople in a temporary grave at the side of the road before his body was relocated by the Americans.

We climbed through barbed wire into the cow pasture next to the lane, where most of the fragments of the plane had scattered. I walked over to the hedgerow separating the field from the lane and to my complete astonishment bent down and picked up a twisted piece of rusted metal - a fragment of Damon's Demon! Tim also found a couple of pieces at the same time. We looked at each other in shock. Remy confirmed that they indeed were from the plane.

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