Speranza comes to Veterans’ Coffee

This month’s Veterans Coffee event featured special guest Vincent Speranza, author of the book “Nuts.”

During his presentation, Speranza provided the audience with comedic relief, as he recalled his actions in Belgium during WWII.

It took 65 years for him to find out that his actions in Belgium during WWII had been immortalized — for his ingenuity with the beverage that the country is famous for producing, he explained.

He was assigned to Company H, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, as a replacement in November 1944 while the unit licked its wounds from the devastating failure of Operation Market-Garden.

Within weeks, Speranza would be in a foxhole in Bastogne, Belgium — cold, running short on supplies and ammo and surrounded by German troops.

On the second day of the siege, a friend named Joe Willis was wounded with shrapnel in both legs and brought to a makeshift combat hospital in a blown-out church.

When Speranza tracked him down, the fellow paratrooper asked him to get him something to drink.

Speranza explained they were surrounded and no supplies were coming in.

The soldier asked him to check a tavern nearby, there Speranza found a working beer tap.

He filled his helmet and made two trips to the wounded in the church.

He was caught by an angry major and told he would be shot if he did not stop, for fear he would kill the wounded.

Visiting Bastogne in 2009, Speranza found his foxhole still there, but Dutch and Belgian military officials told him that the legend of the soldier filling his helmet with beer for the wounded is still told — and had been immortalized on the label of Bastogne’s Airborne beer.

For more information on Speranza or the monthly Veteran’s Coffee contact Executive Director Brenda Carlan at 706-282-5055.