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Yogi Berra receives the Valor Award from the Bob Feller Foundation at the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State University in Montclair.

(Frances Micklow/The Star-Ledger)

Yogi Berra approached enemy fire the same way he approached opposing pitchers.



Relaxed. So relaxed, it might pass as obliviousness to pressure or danger.

"I didn't even think about death," he said. "I figured if you got hit with a bullet, you wouldn't know it. So I just did what I was supposed to do." Such simplicity of logic served Berra well, on the field and in war.

He was one baseball’s great clutch hitters. His stats — and 10 World Series rings — speak for themselves, and he always talks about his loose grip on the bat in white-knuckle situations.

But this isn’t a column about his baseball records. This is about his war record. This little-known part of his life, long overshadowed by his baseball fame, is being remembered now that his revered generation is dwindling.

Yogi Berra receives the Valor Award from the Bob Feller Foundation at the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State University in Montclair.

In the spring of 1943, Lawrence Berra was a 17-year-old kid playing in the Yankee farm system for $90 a month. His team was the Norfolk (Va.) Tars, which made it convenient for him to go across town and join the Navy when his draft card came.

One year later, he was among the men leading the largest invasion in world history.

"I think his military service has been a little overlooked because the men like him really didn't talk about it much," said Carmen Berra, Yogi's wife of 64 years. "He never talked about it. It wasn't a big thing to him, or to men like him. It was just what they had to do."

On Saturday, Berra received the first Bob Feller Act of Valor Award, one of baseball’s ways to pay homage to the military.

Feller, who died three years ago, was a star pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. The day after Pearl Harbor, he walked away from a $100,000 contract to join the Navy and served aboard the USS Alabama as a gunner.

“He didn’t like me,” Berra said. “One day I asked why. He said, ‘I don’t respect people who didn’t serve their country.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I was at D-Day.’ After that, we became best friends.”

Each year, the award will be given to a Hall of Famer, an active baseball player and an active-duty sailor. The ceremony will take place at the Navy Memorial around Veterans Day, but because traveling is tough for Yogi these days, his portion of the ceremony was videotaped this weekend at the Yogi Berra Museum.

In two corners of the museum, mixed in with the thousands of photographs and balls, bats and gloves of Yogi Berra's greatest baseball moments, are a scant few pictures of Seaman 2nd Class Lawrence Berra. The hat is different, but the wide smile is the same.

And in that smile is no hint of the danger he was either about to encounter or the impact it left on him.

Berra was a "rocketboat man," and in Navy circles, they were heroes of the authentic kind.

Not the balls and strikes kind. The life-and-death kind.

People who — as Bob Feller once said — won the biggest game, maybe of all time.

Rocketboats were speedy, 36-foot gunships, manned by a crew of six and armed with 24 rockets and two .30-caliber machine guns and a twin .50-caliber machine gun. The men on the boats trained in a top-secret program, preparing for a dangerous mission; those 24 boats would be out in front of the full landing force of the Allied invasion on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Yogi Berra volunteered for it, though he may not have known what he was getting into.

"I signed up for the amphibs (amphibious landing crafts)," he recalled.

Dave Kaplan, the executive director of the Berra museum, said Yogi became a "rocketboat man" because the word "rocket" appealed to him in a Buck Rogers kind of way.

"He thought it had an adventurous sound to it," Kaplan said.

After basic training in Bainbridge, Md., and rocketboat training in Norfolk, Berra shipped out, as yet still unaware of his destination or his mission.

"I thought we were going to Japan," Berra said.

Soon enough, he knew. They were going to England to invade France. And they were going first.

The boats broke out of the dawn mist on the English Channel, firing rockets at fortified German positions. Part of the job was to fire and part was to draw fire, so the German machine gun nests could be identified for airstrikes.

“It was like the 4th of July out there,” Berra said. “You couldn’t stick your head up or it would get blown off.”

Part of the job was to shoot down any plane “that flew beneath the clouds,” Berra said. “One of the first ones we got was one of our own. They were yelling at us, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

“And the way those waves were sending us up and down, we had to be careful we didn’t shoot each other.”

In the later hours, the boats circled back and exchanged more gunfire. In the days after the landing, they patrolled the coast, still being strafed by the enemy and returning fire. Berra remembers firing his "twin 50" into a German gun nest ensconced in a hotel on Utah Beach.

"I think I might have got a couple of them," he said with the little laugh that punctuates much of what he says.

Yogi Berra is 88 now. He uses a cane, reluctantly, and admits to "slowing down." But the quick smile and understated humor behind all those Yogi-isms are still there.

And Saturday, while either talking about D-Day with Navy Adm. Michael Jabaley or about catcher's mitts with the admiral's Little League-age son, Christian, Yogi was as lucid as ever.

“He was telling me the new gloves have too much padding,” said young Christian, himself a catcher, who sat with Berra one on one for several minutes before the ceremony. “He said the old ones were like fishnets; they made it easier to catch.”

Life has been one long victory lap for Berra, first for baseball, and now his military service.

He posed for pictures, listened patiently to all the old stories about him and signed a few autographs, though his signature isn't as steady as it once was.

Those hands caught a lot of fastballs, steadied a lot of bats and for a few hellacious days long ago took the battering vibrations of the dual machine gun he fired from behind a sheet metal turret.

MORE MARK DI IONNO COLUMNS

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