BLOOMINGTON - John Cable left Italy on a hospital ship after a 150 mm shell landed 15 to 20 feet away on May 23, 1944, while he was fighting with the U.S. Army's 45th Infantry at Anzio.

Pieces of the shell tore into Cable's right hand and into the tendons of his right leg. There was no time to say goodbye to his unit.

"I lost a lot of men over there," the Bloomington retiree said. "I needed to have closure for World War II."

In May, Cable, now 86, boarded a plane with 19 other World War II veterans and spent 11 days touring the Italian coast, including Salerno where Cable and his men landed and fought.

"They have built up so much," Cable said. "It's nothing but hotels now. The beaches where we landed are now private beaches for the hotels."

Cable, a staff sergeant when he was wounded, said three of his men visited him in the hospital before they moved on to France.

"About half the guys under my command were Catholic and I'm a Protestant," Cable said. "These guys, before they left, gave me a St. Christopher's medal and a rosary. They said they wanted to see that I was protected. That was really something special to me."

But it was the recent Memorial Day ceremony at the American Cemetery and Memorial at Nettuno, southwest of Anzio, which gave Cable the most peace.

Cable brought back two small flags - one a United States flag and the other an Italian - from his trip. "Every grave in the cemetery was decorated with these two flags," Cable said. "It was really something to see."

The flags now decorate what one of Cable's grandsons calls his "medal room."

There, above the desk, hangs a shadowbox-style picture frame that includes a snapshot of a much younger Cable dressed in his Army uniform, two patches from that uniform and Cable's combat medals: a Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster (to denote a second injury), a Bronze Star and two pieces of shrapnel pulled from his leg from the shell that exploded in 1944.

He proudly points to a framed cover of a Life magazine that sits on his desk.

"That's me, the fourth one from the beach," said Cable. "The one in front is a guy we called 'Granddad.'" The soldier, a man from Oklahoma City, was 29 at the time and the oldest in the unit. The cover was for the magazine's March 27, 1944, edition, but Cable said the photo was taken as his unit made a water landing in September 1943.

By the time Cable contacted his parents, the magazine already had left newsstands. His parents, living in Chenoa, found a neighbor who still had a copy.

Last week, after more than an hour of switching between stories of his recent trip to Italy and his time in combat, Cable sat quietly for a moment. Then he said, "That trip gave me a lot of closure and a lot of memories came back."