I am sitting at the intersection of the two main hallways on the ground floor of the West Wing of the Detroit VA. I am the only stationary object in view.

Around me everything is in motion: glass doors swooshing open and closed, ambulances and shuttle vans creeping along the curb. The hallways in all four directions are full of veterans, walking or rolling, stomping, shuffling, limping, striding, gliding.

Other than the Travel Office this intersection is home primarily to an ATM machine. It is a destination only for those looking for gas money. Otherwise it’s a place everybody passes on their way to someplace else, a place designed for and devoted to transience.

This is where they mounted the brass plaque honoring Iowa native Sergeant Ralph G. Neppel.

On the evening of December 14, 1944, two months after his twenty-first birthday, Sergeant Neppel was in command of a platoon guarding another four-way intersection in a town called Birgel, Germany. I suppose there was snow on the ground, icy puddles too, maybe water, maybe blood. I imagine burned out buildings stretching away in all four directions. Maybe a ruined church steeple hung with icicles.

Neppel was hunched over the unit’s big machine gun, looking down its barrel at a Panzer tank and 20 German infantrymen advancing up one of the four streets. Neppel’s job was to stop them.

He waited until the tank was a hundred yards away and opened fire, killing several infantry. The tank continued to advance and fired its cannon at him from thirty yards away; the explosion wounded or killed every man in his platoon and blew off both of Sergeant Neppel’s legs below the knee.

When I was twenty-one I was still living at my Mom’s house, and my biggest worry was what to do when I spilled bong water on her sofa. But young Sergeant Neppel had come to the Army from a town named after the man who invented barbed wire.

He was a farm kid and a child of the depression; he probably never saw a doctor before his induction physical. He crawled back to his gun and continued shooting until he had killed all the infantry. According to his Congressional Medal of Honor commendation, “denied infantry support, the tank retreated.”

I never knew that tanks needed infantry support. They don’t in the movies. But Sergeant Neppel didn’t get his military history on Turner Classic Movie Channel, like I do. He knew that the tank needed the foot soldiers so he did what he needed to do to stop the tank. But before the German commander turned his kampfwagen around he climbed down, pulled out his Luger, and shot Sgt. Neppel in the head.

Happily, while Neppel’s boots, and his feet in them, were ten yards away on the other side of the blast crater, his steel helmet remained on his head, so when the medics arrived he urged them to treat his buddies first.

On December 14, 1944, he defeated twenty-five Nazis and a tank, all by himself. On September 10, 1945 he got his Congressional Medal of Honor from President Truman. On December 27, 1945 he married his gal Jean.

It was a busy year for Ralph Neppel.

He came home to Iowa and learned to walk on prosthetic legs. In 1949 he won a tractor on “This is Your Life” and dabbled in farming for a while. Then he and Jean moved to Iowa City where he worked for 19 years at the Iowa City VA Medical Center. They had some kids.

He died in 1987. What a cannon and a pistol couldn’t do, cancer could.

In 1989 they bolted his brass plaque into a brick wall at the intersection of the two main hallways on the ground floor of the West Wing, in a place devoted to impermanence. A place everybody comes through but nobody remembers.

I wonder if anybody in the modern city of Birgel remembers what Sgt. Neppel did when they pass through that intersection. There’s no indication in his Medal of Honor citation of why that crossroads was so important to both armies. Maybe it was not important in itself, but only because it was a place everybody had to go through to get someplace else.

Maybe Sergeant Neppel’s brass plaque is in exactly the right spot.