Eisenhower's Invaders of the Supreme Command pose for a team picture before the title game of the ad hoc military league in Paris in 1945. Lou Kukuruda is fifth from the left in the front row (No. 21). Click photo for larger image.

"I was playing defensive back; it was sudden death," he said, without one trace of irony.

From that grim and sad and vulnerable ship, moaning near the coast of France three days after D-Day, Lou Kukuruda watched the German warplanes still flying desperately overhead, trying to prop up Hitler after the staggering assault of allied forces.

"Where are we gonna go?" he remembers thinking. "Where are we gonna go? I thought we were gonna get hit."

Now he watches Steelers games with his fingers crossed.

For the Memorial Day holiday then, herewith a football column, sort of.

The breakfast crowd at Marge's Place in McKees Rocks the other day included the 86-year-old former member of the 234th MP Company, with his wondrously vivid memory of World War II's European Theatre and his battered yellow envelope filled with forgotten football history.

It is, more accurately, military history.

Lou dumped it out right there amid the eggs ("over pretty hard"), the sausage, the home fries, toast and coffee. There are a couple of rosters, some photos, a gold pin with a football on the front and his name spelled incorrectly on the back, and a newspaper clipping about a Crafton orphanage that at one time had 400 alumni in the armed forces of the United States of America, one being Lou Kukuruda.

He's even got the menu from the football banquet.

"Filet mignon," he beams, pointing at it. "And wine. They treated us pretty good."

Well maybe they figured, 'Look, ya saved the world, so here, have a good piece of meat."

Lou's football career hit its apex on the afternoon of Jan. 7, 1945, in the championship game of an eight-team league made up of various military outfits. Lou's team was named Eisenhower's Invaders of the Supreme Command, which beats the hell out of, like, the Bears.

But Lou wasn't just a running back and a defensive back for Ike's footballers, he was Ike's MP. At Eisenhower's London headquarters three years before, Lou took a direct command from the general himself.

"He came out of his office and told me, 'I don't want to see anybody. Don't let anybody in.' "

First person who tried to get in?

Patton.

That a little scary, Lou?

"Oh it was!" he said. "I had my gun though."

History tells us, though not literally, that Lou didn't have to shoot Patton. A lot of things might have gone differently otherwise.

But what did Patton say?

"He just walked away," Lou said. "He said, 'I'll get in.' "

How you go from playing baseball, softball and mostly football at what was called St. Paul's Orphanage Asylum in Crafton to telling General George S. Patton to move along is the kind of story that never seems to surface enough around Memorial Day. We let guys like Lou Kukuruda think they're nobody while we arrange news conferences so high school kids with their letters of intent can think they're somebody.

But all right, back to the action.

In the fall of 1944, the Invaders went 6-0-1 on the football fields of France. The other teams, each with a roster of about 25 men plus coaches and even scouts, were the Terrors, the Blue Devils, the Raiders, the Defenders, the Invincibles, the Mud Bloggers and the Thunderbolts. Lou's Invaders beat the poorly named Invincibles, 67-0.

"That's when I was throwing the ball," Lou said.

In the title game at Parc des Princes in Paris (the program says "Kickoff: 1430 hours), the Invaders and Thunderbolts slugged each other senseless through four quarters of a 0-0 tie. In overtime, the Thunderbolts finally captured what they called the Champagne Bowl, 6-0.

I asked Lou if they played an entire extra period or if it was, you should excuse the expression, sudden death.

"I was playing defensive back; it was sudden death," he said, without one trace of irony.

Lou came back from Europe on another ship, this one filled with relief and joy and hope.

"But it would have been a heckuva feeling," he said, "not having anybody."

Orphaned at the age of 3, Lou spent nearly 18 years at St. Paul's, but he brought more back from the war than just that Patton story and some football memorabilia.

"A buddy of mine said he was going over to the [Women's Army Corps] tent and did I want to go," Lou said. "I didn't, but I was standing outside waiting for him and this gal comes out and asks if I'll come in and have some cake. I started talking to this other girl who was frying the bacon. I'd go back and talk to her again sometimes. I finally asked for a date."

The rest is what sometimes gets called real history, not football, not military.

The girl frying the bacon was Vivian Christesen, from Montana. They married in a French cathedral right before the war ended. At the house in Ingram, they raised eight children on Lou's job as a painter and the customary diligence. Now there are 15 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Vivian has been gone more than 20 years now, but Lou was flying to Colorado this weekend for his grandson Jeff's graduation from the Air Force Academy. His granddaughter, Emily, is a student there as well. What military families like this have and continue to do for this country can barely be expressed. It's not too much to ask to remember it once in a while, even if you've got to invoke Eisenhower's lost Invaders of the Supreme Command.