Synchronicity

Rico says the odds are pretty incredible, but Corey Kilgannon has the true story in The New York Times:

Just before Benjamin Klein’s open-heart surgery, his surgeon told him not to be afraid. Mr. Klein, who is 90, scoffed. “He said,” recalled the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Girardi,
‘There’s nothing you can do that I can’t get through — I’ve been through Normandy,’"That could have been construed as puffery by some civilians, but not to the man in the next bed, Victor Allegretti, 86, who later heard Mr. Klein tell hospital staff members about his war service.
“My ears perked up like a canary,” said Mr. Allegretti, who took such interest because he, too, fought in Normandy during World War II.
The two old soldiers began talking, and realized they shared more than that. They were both in the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, and both rode gliders, in flights several hours apart, into battle on the 6th of June 1944, D-Day.
Those flimsy aircraft were crucial to the success of the invasion forces at Normandy’s Utah Beach. They were towed by plane from England, soaring over the beaches, and were dropped down under heavy enemy fire to skid dangerously onto the blood-stained fields and into the raging combat of the historic fight.
And so two old soldiers, who stormed Normandy 66 years ago, serendipitously crossed paths in a preoperation room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side, awaiting another daunting situation: open-heart surgery, which for the elderly can be especially risky.
In that room, they shared D-Day memories and realized “we could literally have been a mile away from each other,” Mr. Klein said.
Mr. Allegretti called it “a million-to-one shot” that he might run into another glider man from D-Day all these year later. “And he was a glider pilot,” Mr. Allegretti marveled. “I felt like he was the pilot who flew me in that day.”
Meeting for the first time last week, they struck an immediate connection, having both made it through some of the bloodiest battles in military history.
“There was an instant camaraderie,” Mr. Allegretti said. “I grabbed his hand.”
The two men were transported back to Normandy, where they had been assigned to the lightweight, engineless aircraft that were towed to behind the enemy lines to deliver troops, equipment, and ammunition. They saw heavy combat that day and were awarded medals: the Bronze Star for Mr. Klein and the Purple Heart for Mr. Allegretti, who was shot in the knee.
They stayed up late into the night before the surgery, sharing memories and, okay, perhaps exercising a few battle-tested nerves. The next morning, 24 September, they went into surgery at the same time and in adjacent rooms. Each was hooked up to a heart and lung machine and each received a replacement valve exactly 23 millimeters in diameter. Mr. Allegretti’s was taken from a pig heart, Mr. Klein’s from a cow’s.
“I was dumbfounded” about the chance meeting, Mr. Klein said. He sat in his room, his heart monitor blipping away on a screen above the bed. “The very fact that we were there together, that was the bond.” Mr. Klein said he had sensed that Mr. Allegretti was slightly jumpy about the procedure. “I just told him, ‘If you want to talk, I’ll listen,’ ” he said. “There’s a camaraderie you never lose. You give your life for the next person. So any help I could give him, I would do it. It’s an unwritten rule.”
On Thursday, they lay recovering in the hospital in nearby rooms with nearly identical stitched-up chest wounds.
Mr. Klein was one of six children, and Mr. Allegretti was one of five. Both grew up a bit north of New York City: Mr. Allegretti in Harrison, in Westchester County, and Mr. Klein in Woodbridge. Both men served in the Army from 1943 to 1945 and married their hometown sweethearts soon afterward. Mr. Allegretti spent his life as a construction worker, specializing in ceiling and drywall installation. Mr. Klein made his living in wholesale jewelry, specializing in pearls.
But their interim lives fell away as they talked during the past week. They talked war and gliders, which were made with steel-tube frames and canvas or plywood covers and flooring. The gliders carried troops and several tons of equipment and were useful in dropping them behind enemy lines. They were towed in by larger planes and, once released, had only moments to drift without crashing. Glider men generally wore no parachutes, and they had little time to find a safe landing spot. That was difficult in Normandy’s farmland, with its fields tightly bordered by trees and hedgerows.
Both men had rough landings on D-Day. Mr. Allegretti sailed in around 2 a.m. on a Waco CG-4A glider. He and his team worked a heavy, antitank gun, aiming for Germans seeking to get to the Fiere Bridge.
Mr. Klein sailed in hours later on a large, British-made Horsa glider loaded with ten tons of equipment— two jeeps and seven men— that was being towed by a C-47. They left the Aldermaston military airfield in England and flew over the English Channel and over Utah Beach, at the right flank of the attack.
Once freed from the towline, the glider and its crew had perhaps a ninety-second descent of 1,000 feet to the ground in a field near St. Marie du Mont. There were tall hedgerows, and they landed in the biggest space they saw. The glider skidded out of control and slammed into a tree, which Mr. Klein said sheared off the right wing and cut through the aircraft mere inches from his face.
“It was pandemonium, firing in all directions,” he said. The rule of thumb was to run away from shrill fast fire of the Germans’ Schmeisser machine guns, and toward the more laconic firing of the Army’s machine guns.
For the record, there were no presurgery jitters, said Mr. Klein, who now lives in Middletown, New York. “After getting out of World War Two,” he said, “I’m not afraid of nothing and I’m not impressed by nothing.”
Dr. Girardi called this a hallmark of every World War Two veteran he has operated on. “They all had that attitude, every one,” said Dr. Girardi, who, along with Dr. Karl H. Krieger, who operated on Mr. Allegretti, works for the hospital’s Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute. The institute specializes in surgery for the elderly.
For Mr. Klein, the connection between the two men boiled down to one thing: “We were there,” Mr. Klein said. “We were there.”