Kane'ohe's Zane Schlemmer is on his way to Normandy, France, and the town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

He's been there 11 times before.

The past 10 trips have been a whole lot better than the first, which came as a paratrooper jumping out of a C-47 on June 6, 1944 — D-Day.

Schlemmer was a 19-year-old sergeant with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and he remembers the red glow of fellow paratroopers' cigarettes, tracer rounds knifing through his silky canopy, and the awful spectacle of a C-47 aflame and falling out of the sky.

"For a young kid, it was a baptism of fire," Schlemmer said. He and five other men were sent to man an outpost about three miles west of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

"For the first three days, we didn't know whether the seaborne people at Utah beach had landed or not," Schlemmer recalled. "It took three days before word got to us that they had landed."

He was wounded on July 3, 1944, by friendly fire during a battle near La Haye de Puits.

Time has been kinder to Schlemmer, now 84, on his return visits. He first went back in 1974.

"Paratroopers always try to find their landing field, so I found my landing field," Schlemmer said.

He developed friendships, and on a return trip he found that the farmer whose field he landed in had mounted a plaque on a rock in his honor. Schlemmer even got his own street: Rue Zane Schlemmer.

He'll be back again for four days June 4 to 8 for the 65th anniversary of the historic invasion. He expects to receive the Legion of Merit for meritorious conduct.

He's also bringing six dozen anthurium and ti leaves to place on graves.

This time, he said he's also bringing 1,500 orchid blossoms from Hawai'i that he plans to drop over Sainte-Mere-Eglise by plane. He hopes to line up a C-47 for the drop.

His inspiration comes from a book about the town written by its war-time mayor, Alexandre Renaud, which he quotes:

"Perhaps then their buddies will come in C-47s as they did the first time and before landing at the Cherbourg airport, perhaps their planes will dip low over Sainte-Mere-Eglise and our cemeteries and again drop like multi-colored parachutes, bringing this time freshly-picked flowers from America."

Schlemmer said "for many, many years I've been thinking about this. So finally, I decided I would do it."