IF YOU WERE going to tell a story about something that happened 10 years ago you'd want to talk to somebody who saw it happen and who could show you where and how and why it happened.

M Sgt William J. Hopkins, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and M Sgt George C. Zares, of New York, looked like naturals for this story on D-Day. They had landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day — almost 10 years ago to the minute that you are reading this now.

Hopkins and Zares would make good material for a 10-years-ago-today story. We would ask them to revisit the World War II landing beaches of Normandy. Then we could round up Marie and Renee and Simone, who bicycled up the lane 10 years ago tomorrow or Tuesday. They wouldn't be the 18-year-old belles they were then. They probably would be farm wives with families. But they would tell us all about the great day when the Yanks rolled into their town.

To fill in, we were going to find some old woman — there had to be two or three around — who in darkness and under cover had fashioned an American flag from rags during the Nazi occupation of France, just so as to have it ready to wave when the U.S. arrived.

And then, of course, there would be the old man with a big, gray mustache, if he still were alive, who had stood waiting at the door of the brasserie with a bottle of Calvados for the Americans as they pulled into the first liberated French town.

It would be a glorious reunion.

This is the stuff that war movies and novels are made of. Unfortunately for our plan, this is not the way that wars are really fought. Besides, as far as Normandy is concerned, in 1954 it's no longer possible to tug the heartstrings of the readers with word pictures of ruins and war orphans.

There isn't much wreckage on Omaha Beach, and there is still less at Utah. Ruined villages along the liberation roads have been rebuilt. There are more cars on the highways than ever before. Farmers say it will be a good year for the apple harvest. The black and white dairy cows are as sleek and contented as ever.

Driving out from Paris, we were telling Zares, who enlisted with the 16th Inf, 1st Div, in 1940, and Hopkins, of the 26th Inf and one of the 1st Div's most decorated men, what we wanted for our story. The girls. The old woman. The man with the Calvados.

"They'll all be there, won't they? These Normandy peasants rarely leave their native soil. Surely they'll remember you ..."

"Who'll be there?" asked Zares.

"Didn't see a Frenchman for the first three days," Hopkins added.

This punctured that idea. It wasn't until later on Omaha Beach, deserted now except for a salvage company which still picks up scrap and debris, and except for a few children playing on half-submerged floating docks, that we saw that here was a story after all.

Zares and Hopkins struck out ahead. We had parked the car by a monument erected this past year at the foot of the road leading in from St. Laurent, the nearest village. This is approximately midway along the sands where the Americans landed at H-Hour on D-Day.

The sergeants knew their outfits had landed farther to the east than the point where the monument has been put up.

"It's by a little stream," said Zares. "I know I'd remember it."

"No, there was a hill there," Hopkins replied. "Besides, it's changed a lot. It doesn't look the same now."

There is a shingle, or bank of flat pebbles, two or three feet high, which rims the beach. The tide has pushed these pebbles, averaging three inches in diameter, into a row which looks man-made. This was one of the biggest obstacles in the D-Day landing. Several of the bulldozers in the initial landing were lost.

There had been delay in clearing the shingle so the troops could belly it through to the foot of the bluff.

Zares was sizing up the situation. The shingle looked the same. He hesitated.

"Here's where it was," he said. He paused. "They couldn't get across the shale. They got ripped to pieces here. I saw it. They didn't have a chance because there was no cover. They didn't know which way to turn."

Zares knew the place. Hopkins knew this was it, too. On the side of the shingle opposite the sea was a patch of tall grass which extended to the bluff. And nearly obscured by the grass was the little stream.

If you weren't in the Omaha landing, you probably couldn't relive a scene like this unless you went back to the spot with a D-Day veteran. To the men who landed there, all the cliches about how robins sing where once cannon roared must sound a bit ridiculous. For a very real war comes back to them when they stand once more on the same ground where they risked their lives and saw their comrades fall.

Now it was clear to Zares and Hopkins.

The little stream. Let's see. That means that up on the bluff a little to the right is the German emplacement where the crossfire was coming from. That's why our men had it so rough. They couldn't get across these pebbles. The Germans just mowed them down.

Some of them got through, though. Then they ran for the bottom of that bluff. Yes, but they had to watch it, because of the mines. There was one little draw — that would be it right ahead of us there — where they couldn't get up at all because of the mines. But as soon as they knocked out that emplacement — that one there, half way up the hill to the left — they could go right up the hill.

It was difficult to keep up with Zares and Hopkins now as they walked east along the beach.

Remember? There was another draw toward the east end of the beach. It had a road that led up to the village at the top of the hill, not St. Laurent, but Colleville. Only they couldn't use the road. They had to clear it first. Had to take jeeps and things up a little side trail.

The sergeants found the road. Then the side trail. Halfway up the trail were underground gun mounts which puzzled them. These they hadn't seen before. They were too far up the hill to fire down on the beach. They must have been for antiaircraft.

Farther up the hill was the monument to the 1st Engr Special Brigade. And near the crest of the hill was the marble shaft of the 1st Div, bearing the emblem of the Big Red One and the weathered roll of names of those in that unit who were lost in Normandy.

At the end of the trail was St. Laurent American Military Cemetery, with the graves of 9,385 who died in the Normandy campaign. From here, you get a sweeping view of the whole beach. The British landing beaches are to the east, and Pointe du Hoc, where the 2d Ranger Bn landed, is west of Omaha.

The Rangers had a bloody fight, as you can well see by looking at the place they landed — cliffs which poke out of the English Channel, straight up, some of them 200 feet high. Of 263 men who went ashore and scaled rope ladders to the top, only 52 escaped death or injury.

Right on the point are the old bunkers which housed the German artillery pieces. They still are camouflaged with rock and sod. There is just a slit at the base for the guns which controlled the beach to the east of the point. These were the No. 1 targets of the Rangers.

Inland from the cliff are ugly giant-sized pox marks left by Allied bombers in their assault on the gun positions before the landing. They had missed the blockhouses, and the bombs fell in a pasture. Today some of these craters are fenced off to avoid broken legs among the dairy cows grazing there. Pointe du Hoc is one of the few remaining spots still offering clear evidence that a war was fought in Normandy.

Utah Beach is as lonely as Omaha now. Occasionally French tourists pass by, and here, too, children play on rusted landing craft. Frenchmen always take off their hats and place their hands over their hearts as they read the inscription upon the monument built over the lone concrete bunker which faces the beach. The bunker itself has become a cold, dank museum. Bronze plaques on two walls list the dead of this landing. There still are the remains of a couple of German guns pointing toward the sea.

After a visit to Omaha and Utah beaches, Zares and Hopkins began to remember more.

Actually, there had been an old man. Come to think about it, he had produced a bottle of Calvados, but it was more popular in those days under the name of "liquid dynamite."

He was a friendly sort, Hopkins recalled. Awfully old. A character. Hopkins remembered he lived at a house in Tour-en-Bessin, between Bayeaux and Isigny. It was at an intersection at the west edge of town.

The house was there, and it looked the same, Hopkins said, except for an addition built of new stone which faced the side street. A woman, 35 perhaps, answered the door. Did she know if the old man who was here during the war was still around?

"What old man? There were lots of them."

"The one that lived here."

"None ever lived here. How old?"

"Well, it seems like awfully old, but maybe he wasn't."

"Was he 75?"

"Well, maybe only 65."

"No. Never had anyone 75 here. Not even 65."

It had been a long time, Hopkins realized, but this definitely was the house. Maybe the old man was just there temporarily because of the war. Anyway, he'd greeted them with a bottle of Calvados.

There were some other people Hopkins wanted to look up. They lived at Agy, a hamlet south of Bayeaux. Hopkins wanted to see them because their son had led Co I, 26th Inf, his company, to safety after it had become lost. This was on June 9 when Hopkins was wounded while fighting in the hedge rows. The French boy, Francois Dosseur, was killed by a German bullet. He is remembered with a monument in front of the village church.

Agy is not easy to find if you ask a Frenchman where "Aggie" is instead of "Azh-ee." In fact, if you are going to travel with Normandy veterans, you'd better learn the 1944 American pronunciations for all these places if you want to know where you are in that part of France. It's "Arrow-manch-ies" and Avranch-ies;" "Veerville" and "Cain."

It was dusk when Hopkins found the chateau of Francois' parents. They asked him in, and they spoke of the war — how the Americans had come and how the Germans had fought from behind the hedge rows in their very fields before retreating. How Francois had been shot as he guided the Americans to safety.

Hopkins went outside, but the chateau didn't look the same. He didn't know where to look for the spot where he'd been injured. Every hedge row locked like every other. The elderly Dosseurs no longer were certain where the spot was, either.

It was the little things on this trip back to Normandy with the two sergeants which made it clear that most of the people in this area still have open hearts for the American soldier, even though they don't go out of their way to advertise their feelings.

One day for lunch, Zares and Hopkins stopped at a little hotel in Treviers, just a few miles south of the beach. Treviers was hit hard and is still rebuilding. The woman who ran the restaurant beamed as the sergeants came in. She and her daughter then hustled about in the kitchen and brought out their best five-course dinner, and all for 500 francs.

For nine years now, the newspaper stories about the D-Day anniversary have been supercharged with descriptions how, in Normandy, the skies are blue again and the apple blossoms are pink again and the fields are white with daisies and green with clover again. An account by one writer one year stated that "daisies and bluebells blossom in dirt-filled crevices of a wrecked jeep."

As the years go by, however, it becomes more and more difficult to find a wrecked jeep in Normandy, and it's a sure bet that to find one with daisies and bluebells is impossible.

St. Lo could be counted upon until this year to provide a great deal of. melodramatic material for tearful reading. For it was absolutely true that the clocks stopped the hour that tanks roared into town. And when the heavy guns fired, church steeples crumbled and houses were burned, leaving a jagged silhouette against the flaming-red horizon.

Today, though, St. Lo is getting to be a city of apartment developments and modern shops with glass-tile fronts.

You have to look hard to find traces of war in Normandy. If you're alert, you may recognize a piece of steel landing strip which has been used to patch up the backyard fence. You may see a bar in some village called "Bar of the Sixth of June."

And, oh yes, about the girls who rode the bicycles and who wore lieutenant's bars or insignia pinned to their sweaters. They just don't seem to fit into the picture. We didn't find any girls, and couldn't find anyone who ever had. It seems that all the civilians laid low until the war passed them by. The troops that landed later, not the D-Day veterans, met the girls.

And so, if D-Day Plus 10 Years doesn't appear as impressive as the first, second or third anniversaries, it is only because the fresh signs of war are gone. The feeling of the men who fought it lingers.

You still can get the feel of H-Hour, or H-Hour plus one, two, three or four sometime if you're in Normandy with a D-Day veteran. Don't ask him what happened. Don't ask him how or where or why. Walk along the beach with him. And when he stops, you'll see it all on his face and in his eyes.

The veterans ...

The two soldiers who returned to Normandy, as profiled in the June, 1954 Stars and Stripes story:

M SGT WILLIAM J. HOPKINS, JR.— Now weapons platoon sergeant of Co L, 26th Inf, enlisted in Canadian. Army in 1939. Transferred to U.S. Army, in 1942 and participated in North Africa; Tunisia, Sicily and Normandy campaigns and on through Germany. One of most decorated men in 1st Div, he won three Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars. Was injured near Bayeux on June 9, but rejoined division later. After World War II left service but reenlisted and served with 3d Div in Korea during 1950-51. He rejoined 1st Div last year. He is 31 and has a wife and two children with him in Germany. His parents live in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

M SGT GEORGE C. ZARES— Now is regimental operations sergeant for 16th Inf — the same outfit he landed with on D-Day. He enlisted in 1940 and was assigned to Co D, 16th Inf, and participated in eight campaigns with the initial units that included landings in North Africa, Sicily and France. He left service in 1945 and worked on crashfire truck at La Guardia Field. Re-enlisting ill 1947 he was assigned to Co D, 16th Inf, and for a few months was a first sergeant with 34th FA Bn and then went on recruiting duty in his native New York City. He returned overseas in May 1953 and was again ordered to his favorite regiment the 16th.

The Stripes photographer who accompanied Zares and Hopkins, Ted Rohde, was also a decorated veteran of the Normandy invasion. Here's his profile from the same issue:

TED ROHDE,Stripes photographer for the past two years, came to work a few weeks ago and drew a routine assignment for a picture story to the Normandy beachheads with S&S correspondent in France, Don Walter, and two D-Day veterans from the 1st Div — M Sgt George Zares and M Sgt William Hopkins. When Reporter Walter filed his story on the invasion he noted that the trip to Normandy was the first in 10 years for Rohde and the sergeants. As a first lieutenant, Rohde landed on D Plus 6 with the 951st FA Bn — a 155-mm howitzer outfit in VII Corps. Rohde was air observer and FO and won a Bronze Star and Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster.

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