Sunday Firesides: You Know You’ve Found Your Purpose When . . .

When Ed Pepping, a combat medic with E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne — the famous “Band of Brothers” — parachuted into Normandy in the early hours of June 6, 1944, he came in too fast, landed backward, and suffered a concussion and three cracked vertebrae.

Separated from his unit, Pepping spent the next day trying to reunite with Easy Company a…