Twenty thousand feet above the freezing North Sea, a twenty-millimeter cannon shell exploded inside the radio room of an American B-17 bomber and blinded twenty-year-old Technical Sergeant Forrest Vosler in both eyes. In total darkness, bleeding from his chest, legs, and face, he repaired the shattered radio transmitter entirely by touch so his crew would not die in the ocean. On December 20, 1943, over Bremen, Germany, Vosler's B-17G Flying Fortress lost two engines to anti-aircraft fire and fell behind the formation. German fighters swarmed the crippled bomber like wolves. When an exploding shell knocked out the tail gunner and drove steel fragments into Vosler's legs and chest, Vosler took over the machine gun himself and kept firing until a second shell exploded directly in front of his face. Shrapnel tore into both of his eyes and smashed the bomber's radio equipment. The plane was sinking fast toward the freezing gray waves of the North Sea. Without a working radio to broadcast their coordinates, ditching in the winter ocean meant all ten Americans on board would freeze to death within an hour. Why did another crew member not fix the radio instead of a blinded man? Because every other airman was fighting to keep the plane in the air or manning the guns, and Vosler was the only radio technician on board who knew the internal wiring of the transmitter. Refusing morphine so his mind would stay sharp, and begging his crew not to throw him out to save weight, the blinded twenty-year-old ran his bleeding fingers over the broken metal radio box. Working entirely from memory and touch in absolute darkness, he spliced the severed wires, got the transmitter running, and tapped out distress signals in Morse code until the bomber slammed into the sea. Even then, Vosler was not finished. Crawling out onto the sinking aluminum wing in the freezing waves, the blind sergeant grabbed the unconscious tail gunner and held him from sliding into the ocean until the crew got him into a rubber dinghy and a rescue boat arrived. When a man loves his crew enough, he does not need his eyes to see his duty.