With sticks of TNT strapped to each leg, paratrooper William Bladen leapt into the dark over Normandy in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944.

"Everybody was frightened," says the former demolition expert of his fellow troopers in the 508th regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. With reason: as they jumped, they took heavy ground fire.
"You can see those red tracers coming right up. It looks like they"re going to hit you and you're doing your darndest to get away from them. You don't want to die. But you can't do it; there's so many of them."

In fact a whizzing bullet snapped off his gas mask. "That was awful close," says the College Park native. "I was scared to death."

But Bladen survived that jump and a later drop into Holland in which he suffered a shrapnel wound.
"It was nothing," he says. "There was a hole about an inch long and a half inch wide in my leg. I found a piece of shrapnel, pulled it out and put it in my pocket."