HAYDEN — Delmar Shaw, 89, maintained a knowing, good-natured grin as he surveyed his World War II mementos in a large display case at the Pappy Boyington Field Museum.

When he talked about the display items, he didn’t share stories of harrowing battlefield encounters with the enemy, or the tragic loss of life. Shaw, a nearly lifelong North Idaho resident who currently lives in Coeur d’Alene, was a paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne division during the second World War.

He saw battle in Europe, that’s a fact, and no doubt there are stories of that nature to share.

But he didn’t.

Except for the ones that made him grin.

Like the time he was shot in the back once, he recalled, except the bullet didn’t make it through his backpack.

“I thought I was shot, but I couldn’t feel anything,” Shaw said late last week at the museum at 1600 W. Wyoming Ave., in Hayden.

The liquid he felt running down his backside wasn’t blood, but orange juice that was in his rucksack. His good luck in Europe during the war didn’t start or end there.

The Hayden museum’s owner, Richard Le Francis, helped the reserved and humble Shaw reel off a number of humorous stories.

The war started for Shaw when he sailed for Europe, landing in Naples, Italy. From there he traveled to northern Italy. Then, as part of the 517th parachute regimental combat team, he was dropped into southern France one cloudy morning at 2:30, in the midst of the war with Nazi Germany. He and the others precariously landed in some orchards.

“I was lucky when I landed right between the rows,” Shaw said. “A lot of them got hurt because of the cables holding the grapes up.”

Shaw was born in tiny Latah, Wash., in 1924. He attended school in St. Maries and joined the Army in 1943, and would leave with an honorable discharge on Christmas Day in 1945. Back in the familiar environment of North Idaho after the war, he would marry in 1946, and raise a son, Delvan, and two daughters, Linda and Connie.

After landing in France, Shaw eventually would make his way to neighboring Germany, where German leaders would soon surrender to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, ending the war in the European Theatre in the spring of 1945.

Near the end, Shaw made some notable captures of German soldiers, including one of a German on horseback, which explains the saddle in his display case at the Hayden museum. He also has German bayonets and a machine gun clip.

One day, Shaw captured 25 German soldiers in France and marched them back to his American headquarters. But instead of getting some big medal for his efforts, as he anticipated, he nearly got court-martialed.

“He never frisked them,” said Le Francis, laughing. “They go right into headquarters and they’re pulling out Lugers, and grenades” and other weapons.

Though not earning a medal, Shaw would find a reward.

After the capture — while sharing cigarettes with the Germans, who were smoking one after another and wondering what their fate would be — Shaw learned of a safe loaded with 35,000 French francs.

In secret, Shaw went looking for the safe along with another soldier, who brought along a bazooka to open it. A first bazooka shot missed, but a subsequent blast liberated the cash.

“I put 3,000 francs in my overcoat,” Shaw beamed. He later stashed it in a sergeant’s room just off his barracks.

“But the officers found out about it because the bazooka man couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” Shaw said. “And he had started passing out these French francs because you could spend them in France.”

In deep trouble with officers, Shaw and the other soldiers who had gotten their hands on the money were marched out into a field and drilled for answers, he said. Except for the money Shaw had stashed, the officers rounded up the rest and threw a big party.

Le Francis said Shaw was a “smooth operator” in the midst of the war and subsequent occupation of Germany after the Nazis surrendered. A bit lucky and opportunistic, too.

Shaw found a Leica camera on a dead German, and snapped a whole album worth of photos with the fancy piece of equipment, documenting his European travels.

“I never asked him how the guy got dead,” Le Francis said. Shaw grinned.

Shaw also was given dozens of Nazi propaganda photos by a German officer’s widow, who was going to throw them out with some other items of her husband’s. She wasn’t too pleased with the war, Shaw said.

The propaganda photos are on display in Hayden, too. (Adolf Hitler looked like the cheerful uncle, posing with kids. Others showed Hitler looking distinguished and in charge.)

Shaw later wanted to marry the widow, but his mom was dead-set against it. She didn’t want a German daughter-in-law. Still, the widow ended up writing Shaw for a long time after that.

Shaw learned years later, when his mother died, that the man he had always thought was his dad wasn’t. His mother got pregnant from a German boy, whom she met in Pullman, Wash.

“My name should have been Girsberger,” Shaw said, grinning.

Shaw at one point, while in France, wrangled up a motorcycle, got a French girlfriend on the back and went joyriding through a French village. Soon, though, the military police caught up with him.

“Well, it was after curfew,” Shaw explained.

He tried to get away but wrecked the motorcycle on some slick cobblestones.

“The bike spun around and they grabbed me,” Shaw said. “I got thrown in jail on that one.”

His lieutenant bailed him out the next morning.

“Always after that he called me his problem child,” Shaw said.