Dan McBride, 101st Airborne, Paratrooper Infantry Regiment. Jumped into Normandy on D-Day, jumped into Holland for Operation Market Garden and was in Bastogne at Battle of the Bulge.
From Dan’s interview with USA Today:
I was scared to death of heights,” McBride says, “but I thought, ‘If they can do it, there’s no reason I can’t.’ So I enlisted in the Army and signed up to be a paratrooper.”
Skip ahead to June 1944, in a night sky over Normandy illuminated by Nazi anti-aircraft fire. McBride’s parachute lines got tangled with his leg, and he floated to earth upside down, landing on his head.
“It knocked me out,” he says. “When I came to, everything hurt, even my hair.”
McBride, a sniper and rifle grenadier with the 101st Airborne Division’s 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, wandered in search of friendly forces until bullets began to fly and he saw a German duck behind bushes. “I tossed a grenade up over the hedgerow, and when it went off, I ran up and gave him about 10 with the carbine,” he recalls.
