He was a machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division, a kid from Staten Island, New York. And he was trapped, along with thousands of other American soldiers, in the small Belgian town of Bastogne.
The Germans had surrounded the town. It was bitterly cold. Food, medicine and ammunition were running out.
One day Vince learned that his friend Joe had been wounded. He went looking for him and found him in a church that had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Injured men lay in rows on the floor.
Joe was in pain, and he was thirsty. He asked Vince if he could find him something to drink.
There was no water to spare. But Vince remembered seeing a bombed-out tavern nearby.
He went in and tried the taps. The first one gave nothing. The second one worked. It was beer.
Vince had nothing to carry it in, so he took off his helmet and filled it to the brim.
He carried it carefully back through the ruined streets to the church, and he started giving it to Joe and the wounded men around him. They were so grateful that he went back for more.
On the second trip, a shell landed close by and knocked him off his feet. He spilled half of it. He got up and kept going.
Then an officer walked in, saw a soldier passing around a helmet full of beer to badly wounded men, and gave him a furious telling-off. Beer was not exactly medicine. Vince never forgot that, either.
He survived the war and came home. For decades he barely thought about the story.
Then, many years later, he went back to Bastogne. A local man asked if he knew about the town’s special beer. They called it “Airborne”, and it was served in a little ceramic bowl shaped like a soldier’s helmet. It had been made in honour of the young American who once filled his helmet with beer for the wounded.
That young American was him.
“I’m better known for the helmet full of beer than for my machine gun,” he joked.
Vince went back to Bastogne many times after that. People lined up to thank him and pour him an Airborne beer.
He died on August 2, 2023, at the age of 98.
Would you raise a glass to Vince today? Tell us in the comments.
