I used to work for Paramount and i hosted James Doohan at a Star Trek event where he was the star attraction.

As we spent the day talking, we talked about WWII, since I'm a bit of a WWII buff and he served in the Canadian Airforce.

His role on DDay was fire control, i.e. calling in artillary from the air to the ships in The Channel. It ended up being so cloudy that day that he couldn't fly since he couldn't see ground targets as well as they needed him to. So, they put him on a landing craft with a radio and told him to get out and get inland as fast as he could and call in the guns from the ground. Ya, totally on his own behind enemy lines.

As he got of the landing craft on Juno beach, he was hit within a few steps of the boat. One bullet hit a gold-plated cigarette case in his breast pocket and ricocheted upwards and shattered his collarbone then ricocheted upwards and clipped of a bit of his earlobe.

A 2nd bullet shot off his finger. (I can't recall which one, but, if you look closely on reruns, you can see it.)

He said "Don't let them tell you smoking kills. If i didn't have that cigarette case, it would have hit me in the heart."

We talked WWII stories all day. At the end of the day he thanked me for not talking to him about Star Trek and, instead, that we talked about WWII.

Interesting guy and woman LOVED him. He was in his early 70's at this time, and when we were out in public (restaurants, etc.) women would come up to him and talk to him and ask him for a kiss. I saw him kiss probably about 10 women that day. Many of them were attractive women in their 40's who grew up watching Star Trek. I was amazed at the power he had over these women.

Overall, a pretty fun guy.