70 years later, a soldier returns home

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Helen Harris Cooke had her whole life ahead of her when her first husband, Cecil E. Harris, was lost in the fog of war and the mountains of northeastern France.

Pregnant when Harris left home in Shelbyville to fight in World War II, a 20-year-old mother the last time she heard from him, Cooke remarried and had two more children after Harris was declared dead.

But she never stopped hoping and praying that some sign of him would turn up someday.

Amazingly, it did.

"I always say my prayers at night," said Cooke, now 90. "The Lord answered my prayers after 70 years."

Harris was a 19-year-old private first class in the Army's 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, when his rifle platoon came under heavy fire from German troops in Dambach, France, on the second day of 1945. American soldiers who survived the German attack later realized he was missing.

But four French men stumbled upon what turned out to be a human skull while hiking near Dambach, near the German border, last year. Discovery of the shallow hilltop grave led to an ID tag bearing Harris' name, a DNA match, the return of the remains to American soil and, finally, a funeral Friday morning at Red Bank Baptist Church in Chattanooga, where Cooke lives.

About 100 people, many of them relatives and veterans, attended the solemn service seven decades after his passing. Members of the Tennessee Army National Guard carried in Harris' casket, draped by the American flag. Many-Bears Grinder, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Veterans Affairs, presented Cooke a state flag and other gifts, and U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Chattanooga Republican, gave the widow her husband's military medals.

A bagpiper played taps and "Amazing Grace."

Harris will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Oct. 22. His and Cooke's son, Eddie Harris, who was just a few months old the only time he ever saw his father, said he's looking forward to burying him with the full military honors he deserves.

Eddie is 70 now, a veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf wars who, like the father he has no way of remembering, loves to hunt and fish and ride horses.

"This is just a miracle to me," he said.