(This is the first in a three-part series on stories by World War II veterans. Today, Helen and Ole Soma recount their experiences.)

Helen Soma cherishes her stack of V-mail letters.

These small envelopes, now brown with age, hold only as much communication as could be compressed onto a single sheet of paper.

Helen saved every letter her husband, Ole, ever sent her during the years he was crossing and recrossing the Atlantic on the USS Brooklyn as it ferried troops to Europe, supported the invasion of North Africa, and later, Italy.

Of course, Ole wasn't her husband then. They had decided not to get married until the war was over.

In January, Helen and Ole Soma will be married 63 years. The day they met, Ole told her, "I'm going to marry you."

During wartime, "You just lived from day to day," Ole said. "You never knew what was going to happen."

Ole designed their immaculate house in Bismarck. Among the photos and mementoes is the white banner with three blue stars that Ole's mother hung in her window during the war - three sons in service.

"Thank heavens, no gold star," Helen said. Gold stars were for those who were not coming back.

And leaning against the fireplace is a portrait, in black-and-white, of the USS Brooklyn.

Ole was raised in Newell, in western South Dakota, where his dad, who had come from Norway, ran a creamery. Helen's family was Greek; she was raised in Elmira in upstate New York. After attending business school, she had taken a job in New Jersey, working for Johnson and Johnson.

Without a war, the chances are vanishingly small that they would ever have met. Ole called it destiny, Helen said.

They first met at a Sunday dinner in 1942. Helen was invited by her friend and Ole was invited by his friend; their friends happened to be a brother and sister whose mother encouraged them to invite service people who were away from home. Helen remembers her friend's mother managed to find a ham for that dinner, though meat was almost impossible to get during wartime.

Ole starting writing to her right away after that, she said. Throughout the war, the amount of time they spent together, in person, was probably less than a month, Helen said.

There were no phone calls possible, Helen said. She and Ole just had letters and occasional photos - Ole in his uniform, Ole in swim trunks on the beach at Palermo, with a thatch of blond hair, a football player's build. Which is what he was in high school and in college in 1942 at Augustana in Sioux Falls, S.D.

But colleges couldn't hold their young men in 1942; everybody was going to war. Some guys were even going up to Canada to fly, Ole said.

Ole's draft number was 14, so rather than waiting to be drafted, he and a friend headed for Deadwood and on May 26, 1942, this South Dakota prairie boy, who'd never seen a body of water bigger than a stock pond, signed up for the Navy.

When the war started, the country was so hellbent to get personnel in ships, Ole said, that not even full uniforms were available, and rifles were in such short supply that, upon graduating from two weeks of basic training, some of the 150 guys in his company had to perform the manual at arms with broomsticks.

From training at Great Lakes Naval Base, Ole was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. Checking the diary he kept through his service, Ole reads that he and the Brooklyn left Aug. 9, 1942, en route to Scotland, accompanying troop ships, a convoy that included the battleship Texas and at least 10 destroyers keeping the perimeter against submarines.

An electrician's mate, Ole said he never got seasick, even though the wild North Atlantic's heavy rolls and swells sometimes forced them to strap themselves into their bunks.

Some of the convoy ships had been luxury liners, still furnished with drapes, plush furniture and wood decks, Ole said. Two days out of Boston on the return trip, bringing back Americans to the U.S., one of the big ships, the Wakefield, caught fire, he said.

The Brooklyn and two destroyers dropped out of the convoy to rescue those aboard her, Ole said.

"This was a night rescue off a burning ship in the North Atlantic," Ole said. The sailors lashed the bow of the Brooklyn to the stern of the Wakefield and rigged a gangplank and took off nearly 1,200 people, the largest rescue effort ever recorded, Ole said.

The passengers were given the crew's bunks, so Ole and the crew spent the night on deck, watching the old Wakefield burning.

On March 15, 1942, the day after she turned 21, Helen had enlisted. At that time, the WAVES only took nurses. So she joined the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. (On Aug. 5, 1943, after changes passed by Congress, she was assigned to the regular Army Air Force.)

After basic training in Fort Devens, Mass., Helen went by train to Chicago, and from there to Kearney Army Air Base in Nebraska. She arrived in the dark, was met, assigned to a bunk, and went to the mess hall, where she got a mug of coffee and a bologna sandwich.

At Kearney, then a brand new airfield and a staging area for B-17s, Helen became a company clerk. Her three years in the military were an irreplaceable education, she said.

Celebrities came there, she said. Clark Gable - "short," she recalls - and Jimmy Stewart, tall and lanky like in the movies. "When you're 21, 22, that's pretty exciting," she said.

Her good friend, Rose, later married Milton Berle. And she even met the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb.

In late 1944 and early 1945, the Enola Gay was sent to her base, on its way to Wendover Air Base in Utah, she said. "I met Col. (Paul) Tibbets. We knew something big was going on, but we couldn't talk to anybody." Loose lips sink ships, everyone was told.

Her one enduring disappointment is that she didn't earn a marksman's medal though she was issued an M-1 rifle that she kept clean and polished from basic training through discharge.

"I was so afraid of that gun," she said.

And for 15 to 18 months, though Ole sent her things from all over - beautiful leather gloves from Marseilles, a bracelet - she didn't see him at all.

The Brooklyn's crew spent a month in New York, Ole said, stripping her decks of paint, red linoleum, and teakwood, right down to the metal, and on Sept. 16, 1942, according to Ole's notebook, they left for Norfolk, Va., and from there for Casablanca. Helen still has the full text of the rousing speech delivered by the captain en route, full of vinegar, preparing the crew for the Allied invasion of North Africa.

Since Casablanca was a territory of German-occupied France, the sailors weren't sure what the French would do when U.S. ships arrived.

A couple of ships were left in port: "They shot at us," he said. When one hit splattered red over the ship, Ole was certain blood had been shed. Turned out, they'd used the only ammunition they had - red target practice powder.

After that, the Brooklyn traveled the coast of Africa wherever artillery was needed. The Brooklyn's guns could cover 20 miles, go inland quite a ways, Ole said.

They traveled to Oran, to Algiers, where Ole occasionally saw his oldest brother, who was attached to the Air Force Signal Corps, grinding crystals for radios.

After North Africa, the Brooklyn landed troops at Sicily and patrolled there quite a while, Ole said. He said the crew saw Mount Vesuvius erupt on March 22, 1944; they covered their motors but still spent weeks and weeks cleaning out the ash and sand.

They supported the 8th Army across Sicily and Salerno, up the coast of Italy to Anzio.

"I felt so sorry for the landing troops (at Anzio)," Ole said. "They didn't get off the beach. The Germans' big guns chased us out to sea."

After Normandy, the ship left for southern France - Marseilles, Toulon - to make sure Germans couldn't escape or resupply along the open coast there, he said.

In all, Ole crossed the Atlantic with the Brooklyn 13 times - 80,242 nautical miles, he said.

He received a special citation for developing a portable testing kit for defects in headsets and was discharged at Fort Snelling in Minnesota on Nov. 6, 1945. Helen was discharged Nov. 15, 1945, in Des Moines, Iowa.

They were married in Newell, S.D., on Jan. 27, 1946. In the middle of a terrible blizzard, Helen recalls. They moved to North Dakota from South Dakota in 1963, where Ole made his career working for cooperatives. Their son and daughter both live in South Dakota.

Sixty-three years and they still call each other "honey."

(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@bismarcktribune.com.)