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Girl never forgot GI who was her ‘guardian angel’

Joel Aschbrenner
USA TODAY

Her pigtails caught his eye.

A 12-year-old girl ran alongside Dean Prough’s Army convoy as it rolled through a small German town. She pleaded for food.

Prough gave the girl a candy bar, then another, and then another. Her name was Maria. He took a picture with her and signed the back, “Dean Prough. Ottumwa, Iowa.” He wanted to adopt her, but the Army said no.

Now 94, Prough says he remembers being shocked at how starved the German people were.

He was part of 5th Armored Division that had landed at Utah Beach weeks after D-Day, fought through France, liberated Luxembourg and pushed into Germany within 45 miles of Berlin.

After Japan surrendered, Prough sent a telegram to his sweetheart, Doris, back in Ottumwa: “I’m coming home. How about a date?”

Doris still has the telegram. They married not long after he returned.

The first decade of marriage wasn’t easy. Seventy years ago, soldiers weren’t diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, even when it was common.

“The Army thinks they can take these boys off the farm and teach them to steal, kill and rob and what-have-you, and then just turn them loose and say, ‘We’re done with you,’” Prough says. “Well, that’s not right, because you remember (what happened in the war), and it will always stick in the back of your head. It will always be there.”

Back home in Iowa, Prough refused to sleep with the bedroom door closed, anxious about what lurked outside. He kept a .45-caliber pistol under his pillow.

He preferred to walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk. It’s easier to spot snipers from the middle of the road.

Doris was afraid to share the bed with him after one night when he accidentally gave her a black eye during a particularly violent nightmare.

“When they get like that, you have to have a lot of understanding and talk to them and tell them everything is going to be all right,” Doris says. “Between me and his mother, we finally got him straightened out.”

Married 69 years, Doris and Dean Prough now live at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown.

A few years ago, Dean got a phone call. Maria’s daughter was on the line. Maria had moved to America years ago and had looked up the “Dean Prough. Ottumwa, Iowa” from the photo

They met in Texas, where both have children living.

Maria told him he was her guardian angel.

Prough gave her a dozen red roses and a Hershey bar.

“I think this is where we left off,” he said.

Aschbrenner also reports for The Des Moines Register.

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