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you another month before we draft you, so you can change your mind.” Broderick declined, saying he wanted in now.
    Tom Broderick spent seventeen weeks in basic training for the infantry in Mineral Wells, Texas, before heading to Fort Benning, Georgia, to become a member of the 82nd Airborne. When he finished his training, a captain offered him an instructor’s job and the rank of sergeant. Again Broderick refused the safer alternative, saying he wanted to stay with his outfit and go overseas.
    Broderick’s unit shipped out to England as replacements for the 82nd Airborne men lost in the Normandy invasion. In September, Broderick made his first jump into combat, in Holland. He was in the thick of it immediately, the Battle of Arnhem. It was a joint mission of American and British paratroopers, and their objective was to take the Nijmegen bridge to help pave the Allies’ way into Germany and to discourage any German counterattack. “We jumped at about five hundred feet because we wanted to be a low target. It was one-thirty in the afternoon.
    â€œThe first German I saw I couldn’t shoot, because he was riding a bicycle away from me. I couldn’t shoot at him because he wasn’t shooting at me. Things were different ten minutes later. There were Germans all over the place—they outnumbered us about forty thousand to twenty-eight thousand. It was combat morning, noon, and night.”
    On the fifth day Broderick made a mistake that would alter his life forever. “I remember being in the foxhole and . . . I was lining up my aim on a German. I got a little high in the foxhole and I got shot clean through the head—through the left temple.”
    A Catholic chaplain arrived to administer the last rites, but after slipping into unconsciousness, Broderick somehow managed to stay alive until he awoke a few days later in a British hospital. He was relieved to be out of combat but he had a problem: he couldn’t see. Why not? he asked. His doctors told him, “When that hemorrhage clears up, you’ll be all right.” Broderick continued to believe them until he was sent to Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park, California, one of the two facilities in the nation treating blind veterans.
    Finally a doctor told him the truth. He would be blind forever. “I was stunned. I cried, ‘Aren’t you going to do anything?’ ” He rushed to a fellow veteran who had been hospitalized with him in England, a man recovering from shrapnel in one of his eyes. “I just cried and cried, and he said to me, ‘We knew the whole time, Tom; we just didn’t want to tell you.’ ”
    Broderick was angry and disoriented. When the Army made him take a rehabilitation course in Connecticut, he said, “I rebelled—I just didn’t want to learn braille. I told them I was going to work in my dad’s trucking business just so I could get out of there.”
    It didn’t get much better when he returned to Chicago. He enrolled at Loyola University and the Veterans Administration hired a reader for him, but after only seven weeks Broderick dropped out and went to work for his father. His downslide continued. “They didn’t know what to do with me. Dad had me taking orders on the phone because I could still write. But then I heard of people having to call back to get the orders straightened out. I thought, ‘Hell, I’m screwing up.’ ” He quit after a month.
    Broderick realized he’d have to learn braille. His Veterans Administration counselor also recommended he enroll in a class in insurance sales, a fast-growing field in postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance business. He was no longer the young man angry at his fate. He was now prepared