Where this was said
The D-Day Dry Cleaner: An 18-Year-Old Tom Hanks Meets a Paratrooper
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Tom Hanks sets the scene: he's 18, working as a bellman at the Royal Hotel in Oakland, California. The hotel dry cleaner — he calls him Mike — is absent for two weeks every June. When Mike returns, Tom asks where he went. Mike says they visited a place they first saw as kids: the north of France. He was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne who jumped into Normandy on D-Day in 1944. By 1974 he's in his 50s, delivering hotel laundry. Tom felt 'stupid and small.' The punchline: Mike said they go back 'to visit the buddies that didn't make it home.' The cemeteries. Will Arnett responds with his own story: his grandfather, who served with the Canadian Army attached to the Royal Air Force, told him late in life that a tentmate stepped out of his tent in the dark during the war and walked into a plane propeller. Will asked what his grandfather did. 'I got a new tent mate,' he said. The matter-of-factness was devastating.
While working as a hotel bellman in Oakland at age 18, Hanks struck up a conversation with a dry cleaner named Mike who casually mentioned taking a vacation every June — to Normandy, to visit the graves of the buddies who didn't make it home from D-Day.
