Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The mission of Company A was to seize and hold La Fière bridge that spans the road west of Ste. Mère-Eglise and runs over the Merderet River to Cauquigny and Amfreville. This account is a personal memoir, but it is also very much about my comrades in arms, the heroic members of the 507 and 508 PIRs and the 325 Glider Infantry Regiment.

#2 The author's fellow soldiers did not write about history, they made it. They rarely talked or wrote about combat during the war. The author was 17 when he landed with the 82nd at Casablanca, North Africa in May 1943, and 18 when he made the 505th PIR combat jump at Salerno, Italy, in September 1943.

#3 There were some exceptions to the rule of silence among the veterans. For example, Colonel Roy Creek, who was a captain on D-Day in the 82nd Airborne Division, wrote his recollections of the battle on June 6-7 for the Chef-du-Pont bridge and causeway as an assignment at the Officer Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, two years after the war.

#4 The heroism of soldiers like Pfc. Lenold Peterson, a trooper of Swedish origin from Minnesota, speaks volumes for itself. Peterson was a bazooka gunner who stood up and knocked out two German tanks at a critical moment during the fighting at La Fière causeway.