From Rhine to Rogue, dog tags returned to soldier
Published: February 15, 2006
As a platoon leader in the 80th Infantry Division, Glen Payne fought his way from Normandy through Belgium into the heart of Germany during 18 months of combat.
Somewhere along the way, he lost his military dog tags.
But after more than 60 years and one circuitous route — from a potato patch along the Rhine River to the Rogue Valley — a tag will be returned to Payne during a ceremony in Medford on Thursday.
Payne, 84, who was given a battlefield commission from sergeant to second lieutenant, received several medals, including a Bronze Star for valor, when his unit was punching through the Siegfried Line in western Germany.
“He has never talked about what he did over there,” said his son, Joseph Payne. “He saw his men blown up beside him and senseless killings. It wasn’t anything he was proud of. He just did his service and came home.”
Home at the time was Biggs, a small community near The Dalles.
Payne raised a family and worked at several jobs, including gas station operator, Greyhound bus driver, log truck driver and cement contractor. He didn’t retire until last year.
It was last year when he, at his son’s urging, asked the Jackson County Veterans Service Office if he could have his lost medals replaced.
“When we applied to have his medals reissued, that’s when we found out his dog tag was there,” his son said of the local office’s request to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Mo.
Because his records were apparently among those that had burned years ago at the center, the staff there was unable to track down the owner of the dog tag, said Marty Kimmel, veterans service officer for Jackson County.
The tag was originally found when German potato farmer Theo Weber was plowing his field near Bitburg on May 30, 1981, according to a letter sent from the German Red Cross to the American Red Cross.
Wiping the dirt off, Weber determined it was a U.S. Army dog tag. Besides Payne’s name and military identification number, the military ID tag also included his blood type O and his religion P for Protestant.
Payne, who landed on Utah Beach on July 1, 1944, doesn’t recall being in Bitburg. But a map of his unit’s campaign indicates it crossed the Rhine at Bitburg.
He was awarded a Bronze Star for valor early in 1945.
“While assaulting the Siegfried Line on Feb. 8, 1945, heavy sniper action harassed the company in which Lt. Payne served,” the citation reads. “Leading a party of six men, Lt. Payne purposefully exposed himself in order to draw fire and thus located the snipers.”
The veteran shrugs off the citation for heroism, although he notes he did have a shrapnel wound to his right hand.
“Just enough to draw blood,” he said.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: