Here it is, in short. I would need to cross check some things to make sure it is all correct, but this is the story in brief:
Some time in March, 1944, the 45th was moving into Germany in near constant combat. Grandad was a machine gunner. His best friend was named Dizzy, and Dizzy carried the tripod in the three man crew. Dizzy was killed in combat. At that time, the Allies had an agreement among themselves that if any of the Allied powers liberated POWs from the Germans, they could use them in their own armies until the war ended, rather than go through everything it would take to repatriate them.
Shortly after Dizzy was killed, Grandad's unit received a Soviet POW named Stanislav Ordinsky. He was Ukranian, a former university professor who spoke seven languages fluently, but not English (haha). Grandad was a farm boy from Royse City, Texas, and spoke some Spanish. And that was how they communicated until Stanislav learned English. They became good friends through combat and some other escapades, and when the war ended, Stanislav gave Grandad his address in Kiev and headed east for the USSR.
Every year on VE Day for the next 45 or 46 years, Grandad would drop a letter in the mail for Stanislav. There was never a response. Then the Wall fell, and sometime that year or next he got a letter back from Stanislav. Turns out that after he got home, Stanislav was sent to a Gulag in Siberia for a number of years, a consequence of having served with the Americans. When he got out of the Gulag, the Soviets had expunged his military service records. This was devastating, because without service records a person could not easily get any sort of quality medical care from the state. Nevertheless, he carried on.
Late in the 1980s, Stanislav's son died, leaving a son of his own for Stanislav to care for. Then the grandson came down with leukemia, and because Stanislav could not get good medical care, this was a death sentence. And finally, after all of this time, he received the first letter from my Grandad. The state had let the mail through at last. And so he was writing my grandfather to see if there was any way to recover US Army records which might prove to Ukranian authorities that he had served.
Grandad and Grandma hopped a plane to Washington, DC and started poking around. Before long, someone from the State Department heard their story and got involved. They flew my grandparents to Kiev, and brought Stanislav and his grandson back to the United States for medical treatment. The boy recovered, Stanislav's service records were amended, and I learned as a teenager that everyone from the former USSR weren't monsters after all.
My Grandad was a great man.