The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The bravest of the world set on a course to destroy tyranny. D-Day was about to happen-a testament to man's brutality and compassion. It’s just amazing how all of this came together.It was a letter to the troops who would be involved in the most audacious invasion in the history of the world. He’s the luckiest guy in the world to be alive, and I’m even more lucky to meet him. “It’s kind of-what goes around comes around. “It was a thrill for me to buy a car from a guy who drove a tank for my grandfather,” Waters adds. Despite all his gruffness, he was a very loving person. “He had two languages: one was English and the other was profanity. “I remember him he was a great big man,” Waters says. He met his grandfather in 1945, when he was 4 years old. If he was going to buy a vehicle, he was going to buy it from me.” Patton’s grandson chose to buy a vehicle from me. “He brought his grandfather’s boots along and showed them to me. “George was overwhelmed,” Schaetzel says. Schaetzel also had signed the dashboard and a Chevrolet hat that Waters keeps in the vehicle. Seven decades later, when Waters picked up his new Equinox, he was surprised to discover it sported a four-star license plate, as well as his famous grandfather’s division medallion on the grille, the trunk, and each side of the vehicle. He came back and hunkered down alongside me and said, ‘You OK?’ I said, ‘I’ll be OK.’ He said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘Wisconsin.’ He patted me on the back and said, ‘Good luck, soldier,’ and jumped off the tank and got into his jeep and drove away.” He put his arm over my shoulder and said, ‘Soldier, what happened here?’ I told him, ‘Take a look in my turret.’ Patton.’ He jumped out and hopped onto the back deck of my tank. “The next morning, a jeep came driving up,” he adds. I was feeling very scared because I was all by myself and I wasn’t feeling too well because I had been burned. “I was charged with the responsibility of staying with them overnight. “If you’re in an area with casualties, you don’t just abandon them,” says Schaetzel, who served as a tank driver. A bazooka had ripped into Schaetzel’s tank, killing three of his comrades and immobilizing their vehicle. I’ve got 21,000 miles on it, and I can hardly wait to get to 200,000. “We found a little place in the mountains and it took us right there. “This Equinox can take you just about anywhere you want to go,” Waters enthuses. † But, most important for Waters, the vehicle boasts 63.5 cubic feet of maximum cargo space † for comfortable travel, as well as the Chevrolet MyLink infotainment system. Waters appreciates that the Equinox is easy for him and his wife, Martha, to get in and out of, and that it offers advanced safety technology, a panoramic power sunroof, and an available trailering package. So it was simple for him to help Waters, 77, choose the perfect Chevy for his lifestyle. In fact, Schaetzel started selling cars in 1951 and has spent his entire career with Chevrolet. He said, ‘You need an Equinox.’ I didn’t realize he’d sold 17,000 cars.” “He sat there thinking for a while and asked me a few questions, like what do I like, where do I go. “I said, ‘What do you think I should get?’” Waters says. But it was when they met again during a fundraiser at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis., for the Brian LaViolette Scholarship Foundation, which had helped sponsor Schaetzel’s trip to Pilsen, that the topic of the car sale came up. The pair talk on the phone almost every day. “He looked up at me and said, ‘I drove a tank for that S.O.B.’ We became best friends. “We met and started talking about my grandfather,” says Waters, who spends about 100 days each year talking to veterans groups. He had met Schaetzel several years before, during a festival in Pilsen, Czech Republic, to celebrate the town’s liberation by Patton’s Third Army from the Nazis. “You drove a tank for my grandfather I want to buy a car from you,” Waters told Schaetzel. When it came time for George Patton Waters to buy a new vehicle, there was no question where he would go to buy it: Buss Chevrolet in Shawano, Wis., where 94-year-old World War II veteran Reuben Schaetzel is a salesman.
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