They knew he and his comrades-in-arms had helped drive German forces off the Normandy coast on D-Day, beginning the 1944 Allied liberation of Europe. They knew Powers and his buddies had fought their way from France to Adolf Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Eagle's Nest. They knew Powers and millions of men like him had helped save the world from tyranny 60 years ago.

Audience members knew Powers before they met him, having seen an actor portray the Clinchco man in Tom Hanks' and Steven Spielberg's acclaimed 2001 HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers."

But the target of such hero worship never felt comfortable with the recognition. For him, the heroes are the men who didn't get to come home. For him, war stories were never meant to be told around the family dinner table.

For him, World War II wasn't a path to glory. It was a job that had to be done by ordinary Americans - on the battlefield and on the home front.

"My name's Darrell 'Shifty' Powers," he said to the audience, simply and quietly, before telling his story in his own words.

BECOMING A SOLDIER

Like most veterans, Powers didn't spout a string of colorfully dramatic battle tales for his audience. He simply began with the beginning.

Powers was 18 and a machinist trainee in Norfolk when he enlisted in the Army in 1942 during the war's early days.

He was assigned to the newly formed 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and began training at Camp Toccoa, Ga. There, the new regiment earned its nickname, "Currahee," a Cherokee word meaning "stand alone."

Each day, their training officer, Herbert Sobel, forced the recruits to run six miles up and down Currahee Mountain. Trainees would hike 20 miles without water. Sobel would nitpick the young men constantly, gradually transforming them into one of the Army's toughest fighting units.

After four months, the 506th's 2nd Battalion marched 116 miles from northeast Georgia to Atlanta, then boarded trains for parachute school at Ft. Benning, Powers said.

In their third week at Ft. Benning, the soldiers learned how to pack their own parachutes, he explained. "I'd lie awake at night, wondering if I'd done it right."

Trainees were required to complete four daylight parachute jumps and one night jump to qualify for their parachutist badge, Powers said. Soon, they began practicing night combat jumps with a rifle, grenades, a helmet, an entrenching tool, a canteen and three days of rations.

It takes three things to survive in combat, Powers said - a helmet to protect your head, a rifle to fight back and an entrenching tool to dig a hole where you can withstand enemy mortar attacks.

"You can go without food and water for a long time," he said. "We tried it."

In mid-1943, the 506th was attached to the 101st Airborne Division. Three months later, the troops boarded ships for the 12-day cruise to England, where they would spend a year preparing to invade the European continent.

Powers remembered seeing residents of a nearby town practice their own brand of warfare. They would conduct defensive drills, grabbing rakes, hoes, anything close at hand with which they could pummel invading German troops.

D-DAY

At about 1 a.m. on June 6, 1944, Powers and other members of his unit, Easy Company, rode a plane across the Normandy coastline and prepared to parachute into German fortified positions.

"I could hear bullets and shrapnel hitting the plane," he said. "As I jumped out the door, I could see that the left motor was on fire."

Powers landed in a pasture under a full moon, then hid with two other men in the giant hedgerows which divided French farmers' lands. They soon realized they were a day's walk away from their intended drop zone.

Powers and other men spent the night at an 82nd Airborne Division roadblock, then tried to extract a jeep from a crash-landed glider on the beach to speed their trip to rejoin Easy Company. The jeep was stuck. They tried to blast it free with explosives, but all the wreckage caught fire. "We kept on walking."

Airborne troops spent almost a week fighting at Carentan and battling German troops just a few feet away from them on the other side of hedgerows, Powers said. Then the 506th was sent back to England to prepare for an invasion of Holland.

THE DOOR TO GERMANY

On a beautiful, sunny day in mid-September, 1944, the 506th parachuted into Holland with elements of the 82nd and Polish and English divisions. They were to secure a road for tanks and supply shipments, preparing for a push across the Rhine River into Germany. But the plan didn't work, Powers said.

The English troops landed in the midst of a German tank division. "They were slaughtered," he said.

Easy Company spent three months fighting for control of the same road, Powers explained, laying low during the day and moving at night.

One night, he was on patrol, with orders to shoot anyone he saw. He froze at the sound of a person moving in the darkness, but figured the noise wasn't big enough for German troops.

Bracing to shoot if necessary, Powers said a password, "thunder," and got the correct reply, "flash." The intruder turned out to be his buddy Bill King, who had been wounded but left the hospital without authorization to rejoin the unit.

HITLER COUNTERATTACKS

From late November until a few days before Christmas, Easy Company rested and resupplied in France.

On Dec. 18, the unit was awaiting dinner when they learned that German troops had counterattacked the long, thin line of Allied defenders on the front in Belgium's Ardennes forest. The 506th was sent to defend the town of Bastogne with little food and no winter clothing.

For nearly a week, the troops fought off a much larger, encircling German force. Clouds prevented the air corps from dropping in fresh supplies.

"I can't describe how miserable it was," Powers said. "It was the worst battle we had. The wind would cut you in two. The warmest place you had was your foxhole."

Hungry troops once managed to find a stash of brown beans, Powers said. "They were seasoned real good. They had worms in them."

Nowadays, when snow covers the ground in Clinchco, Powers said he often sits in front of a fire and finds himself thinking, "Man, I'm glad I'm not in Bastogne."

Easy Company lost 24 men during the Normandy invasion and lost another nine in Holland, he said. But that week of fighting at Bastogne cost the company 16 men.

Hitler's forces were finally pushed back by mid-January. Slightly more than a month later, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower met the 101st Airborne in France and awarded it the Distinguished Unit Citation for holding Bastogne.

THE ENDGAME

The last days of the war were relatively quiet for Easy Company, as allied forces rapidly pushed the Germans backward across their own homeland in retreat. In early May 1945, the 506th got its final combat assignment of the war - capturing Hitler's Eagle's Nest - but they knew by then that their victory was all but official.

Powers didn't go to the Eagle's Nest. "I was too busy celebrating," he joked.

Soon, he had earned enough combat points to rotate off the front lines and come home.

Powers had emerged relatively unscathed from nearly a year of fighting, but he was lucky to survive the trip out of combat.

He was riding in a truck that collided head-on with another Army truck, killing one soldier. Powers was badly skinned up, with broken bones. He woke up in a hospital, feeling sorry for himself.

"Then I looked around the room and saw another guy. He was in a full body cast, head to toe, with only a couple little eye holes. That cured me."

After the war, Powers worked as a machinist in California for a few years, then worked for Clinchfield Coal Co. for 33 years.

He had boxed up his memories of combat. Powers didn't discuss the war with his family or acquaintances until Hanks and Spielberg immortalized Easy Company on the television screen.

Even during his Oct. 9 public speaking engagement at MECC, Powers refrained from telling the worst of it - the smell of decaying bodies, the knowledge that your bullet killed the man lying in front of you, the grief of watching friends die.

But an audience member summed up Powers' experience from her own perspective.

Jacqueline Havaux Bowers, the wife of retired Big Stone Gap minister Hugh Bowers, stood up. She explained that she was a little Belgian girl living under Nazi occupation near Bastogne during the war, and followed the progress of the battle on her father's map. "I was one of those kids who would ask GIs for cigarettes and chocolate."

Bowers came to the podium to hug Powers.

"I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did for us," she said. "I wouldn't be here at all, my family wouldn't be here at all, if it wasn't for him."