Keith Fiscus wore a red, white and blue vest to work Wednesday, and his employers thought it was great.

I’m guessing that Keith’s employers figure he has pretty much earned the right to wear the vest.

You may not guess it by looking at him, but Keith is your basic war hero. One of your members of the Greatest Generation. Keith doesn’t really see it that way. Ask Keith about his service, and he’ll shrug and try to deflect any praise.

“It wasn’t anything I asked for,” he said.

Keith wore the vest to commemorate a pretty special day in his life. On Wednesday, he marked the 64th anniversary of his liberation from the infamous Dachau German concentration camp.

“It probably doesn’t mean that much to other people, but it does to me,” Keith said.

In 1943, Keith graduated from high school in Sedan, Kan., and like most young men at the time, he joined the military. After six weeks of basic training, he was assigned to the 3rd Army and shipped overseas. Keith said he was told that because he was going to be working as an intelligence and reconnaissance soldier, he didn’t need additional training.

“They told me I would probably be dead in six weeks, so there wasn’t any sense in spending more time training me,” Keith said.

Keith spent much of the war operating behind enemy lines. It was rough and dangerous work. So rough and dangerous, in fact, that the young kid from Kansas soon found himself promoted to captain.

“When all the other officers got killed, you just moved up,” Keith said. “That’s a cruel way to say it, but it’s true.”

On April 29, 1944, exactly one year before he would be liberated from Dachau, Keith was captured in Austria. He was part of a group of U.S. soldiers who had taken a German pillbox and then got caught up in a vicious German counterattack.

It was his status as an intelligence officer, Keith speculates, that led him to be sent to Dachau instead of a more conventional prisoner-of-war camp. Keith said he was constantly interrogated by SS soldiers. Most of those interrogations, he said, ended with him being beaten, often with the butt of a German rifle.

“But I wouldn’t tell them anything,” he said.

As bad as Keith had it, he realized that the other prisoners had it much worse. On almost a daily basis, he saw other prisoners, many of them captured U.S. bomber crews, executed by German soldiers. All told, Keith spent nine months at Dachau. When he was captured, he weighed 180 pounds. When the camp was liberated, he weighed 93 pounds. It took Keith months to recover from his treatment at Dachau.

In the summer of 1945, he was sent to what then was the O’Reilly General Army Hospital in Springfield. In August of 1945, he was deemed well enough to travel. He boarded a bus and a few hours later walked into his parents’ living room.

“They didn’t know I was alive,” Keith said. “I thought my mother was going to have a heart attack, and my dad shed a tear or two.”

In the fall of 1945, Keith enrolled at what now is Missouri State University in Springfield. In one of his first classes, he noticed “this little girl with the most sparkling eyes I ever saw and a smile that could melt an iceberg.”

That “little girl,” whose name was Paulene, soon became Keith’s wife. He told me Wednesday that meeting Paulene was the best thing that happened to him.

After two years in Springfield, Keith and Paulene moved to Manhattan, Kan., where he got his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Kansas State University. He taught high school for five years before getting his doctorate in horticulture at the University of Illinois. Keith spent 31 years teaching at the university level. In the 1980s, he retired. He and Paulene moved to Coffeyville, Kan., and he took a job in the garden center at the town’s Wal-Mart. He and Paulene moved to Joplin in 1991, and he’s been working at the 15th Street Wal-Mart for most of those years.

Keith is a greeter now at Wal-Mart. He works from 6:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. every day except Mondays and Thursdays.

While I chatted with Keith, I wondered if all those Wal-Mart customers walking past the smiling old gentleman in the red, white and blue vest realized what he had been through. I wondered if they knew that he earned two Purple Hearts. Or that he suffered flashbacks and sleepless nights for years after the war. Or that it took him decades to come to terms with his war experiences.

If not, I’m hoping that some of them do now. And I’m hoping that some of those customers who enter the north doors of that Wal-Mart on 15th Street might take a minute to stop, shake Keith’s hand and tell him thanks.