Yank paratrooper-became quiet hero

   Buck Private Joe Bressler then 22 and his unit, the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division, jumped 10 miles inland from D-Day’s beaches assigned to hinder German attempts to send in reserves.
   “I had a bad landing on top of a hedgerow,” said Bressler, who now lives in Pompano Beach. “I broke my ankle.  On the other side of the hedgerow a German was shooting at me. He’d been shooting at me all the way down, I could see the tracers.”
   The hedgerow was an impassible tangle of brush 15 feet high.  “ I had to throw a grenade over it from flat on my back. I was afraid it would fall back on me. I waited for it to go off, It’s only four seconds but it seemed like 44. It went off and I had no more trouble from him.”
   Unable to walk, surrounded by German troops. Bressler spent the next eight days holed up in a shell-pocked house watching German half-tracks zoom by on the adjoining road until the American troops from the beaches arrived.
   Sent back to recuperate at a hospital in Wales, Bressler became restless in less than a month
   “I got a wheelchair, I got by the guard at the gate and went down a big hill into town — into a pub. I had a hell of a good time.
  But that night after fhey'd all left I couldn’t get back up the hill. So I rolled over to the train station and asked to go to Nottingham.
   There he stunned his officers by showing up at his unit’s camp well before he was supposed to-be healed.
   “They put me on light duty. Then a paratroop drop over Holland was coming up and I wanted to go even though I was still hobbling on a cane. When I jumped I taped my feet together so I wouldn’t land on the bad leg.”
   He survived the jump. It makes him laugh even today.
   “I was just a young kid full' of p — and vinegar.
   “I must have been crazy”

[The Miami Herald, Miami, Fl, 23 Jul 1998, Thu, Page 50]