An 88-year-old veteran was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart this week--for the bullet he took in combat in Germany in 1945.
The South Dakota man, Charles Bledsoe, was given last rites in the field, the Argus Leader reports:
Bledsoe received crushing injuries to his chest and groin when he and a medic dived into a depression as a tank passed over them.
"The dust cleared. The medic was dead. I just pushed him off. I got all mixed up in the head then."
Bledsoe says he was given the Last Rites, lost consciousness and awakened in a hospital in France to find the war in Europe was over and President Franklin Roosevelt had died.
During his convalescence, Bledsoe had inadvertently been listed as killed in action, and his family in his native French Lick, IN. held a memorial service for him. He caused quite a stir when he came home.
"I had a cousin faint," he says.
But the wound never made it onto Bledsoe's discharge papers.
When he tried to apply to the Sioux Falls chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and was denied last year, he began researching records. Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) aided Bledsoe and presented him with the awards Wednesday at the Sioux Falls Veterans Affairs hospital, according to the Associated Press.