N.J. Student Replaces WWII Veteran's Stolen Medals

hey were born seven decades apart, but fate brought them together. It's a love story, but not the kind you think.

Workplace friendships are generally generational. The young blond at the front desk rarely has time for the old geezer who can't figure out the copier.

"Everybody says, 'Why is a 22-year-old girl sitting around with some 90-year-old at work?'" Eyres said.

A couple of years ago, Eyres started asking him questions about his military service. Morris was in the Army during WWII. He put the fuses in bombs.

"And then I decided I should really write these down," Eyres said. "This is important."

And, so it went on for months. Morris spilled his stories, and Eyres soaked them up in a notebook. One day, Morris came to work with a brand new, harrowing account.

"They went in through here, and started stealing whatever they felt like they wanted to take," Morris said.

"He said to me, 'I really miss my medals,'" Eyres said. "And, that day I decided I was going to get them back. So I started doing some research."

Using photos she found in military magazines, Alison conducted her own little covert operation.

"I said, 'Jack, point out to me -- what were the medals that you had?' I was trying not to make it obvious," she said.

WWII veteran Jack Morris looks at all the medals his friend Allison Eyres replaced. / CBS News A few weeks later -- they were all replaced.

In America, we're now losing about 600 WWII vets every day, and far too many of those remaining don't have an Allison to take in their tales and award them the immortality they deserve.

"He's someone I will never forget," she said. "I will tell my kids his stories. I will tell anybody that wants to listen."

Everyday I call my father and check on him ~ he's in his 90s now. During WWII he was stationed at Bolling Field with First Squadron. That was more or less like Air Force One ops today with some serious airplane maintenance in the mix.

He was assigned for a good long while to the only non-experimental pressurized and heated cabin aircraft in the possession of the US Army Airforce.

His slipstick stack had PRESIDENT and if Roosevelt had ever flown a military plane he'd flown that one. As it was just about every notable in the US top echelon, military or civilian, did fly in that plane ~ one time or another.

Just a few weeks ago I ran into the information to identify the officer/pilot who'd gone with him to New Jersey only to get their plane snowed in during a blizzard. He was Eisenhower's weatherman ~ possibly the single most important man in the world for a couple of weeks while he predicted the best day and time for D-Day! He'd made a transatlantic flight during that period ~ after departing from Newark in a blizzard.

I love the internet ~ 20 years ago I couldn't have found out anything about my dad's stories ~ now I can add names to them.

Over the years he discussed coming over to the Virginia jungles to pick up planes, or drop off pilots ~ just mundane things. He had no idea where those places really were since there were a lot of small airfields all over Fairfax county and Alexandria. Now there's a historic society in the area that focuses on these airfields ~ they're still trying to find some of them. I live right at the end of one of the major runways for the field which saw most of the troop transport planes take off to cross the Atlantic. For some planes, maintenance crews hopped over from Bolling. Others were rotated through Bolling for a last minute check while their pilots got a send off from a General grade officer, or, in some cases, FDR himself.

I know what my dad told me about it all, and now i understand this ~ not some other place ~ was the Line of Demarcation in a Great War and heroic warriors trod this place ~ as a 6 month old I watched as their planes groaned on their take off from Bolling ~ we lived up the hill on Portland street ~ so those are my first impressions off life. That was literally the front line, as was this place just 14 miles away.

Every evening when my father would be returning from somewhere my mother would take me outside and point out his plane to me, and say 'there's your daddy coming home', and in a few minutes that would be true.

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