Winters and Welsh simply walked toward the man, who took off. The Americans split the silverware between them. Forty-five years later, both men were still using the Berchtesgaden Hof’s silverware in t...
When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive. When a man was killed—he looked ‘s...
There was an excess of drinking, whoring, fighting. Older British observers complained, The trouble with you Yanks is that you are overpaid, oversexed, and over here. (To which the Yanks would reply,...
The myths emphasized the relatedness of life, for in them plants and animals talked and exhibited other human characteristics. The myths taught young Curly that everything had its place and function a...
The Easy Company men began throwing grenades at the retreating enemy. Compton had been an All-American catcher on the UCLA baseball team. The distance to the fleeing enemy was about the same as from h...
On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal A...
Both Custer and Crazy Horse, in short, still had much to learn about each other.
1939 New York World’s Fair,
You liked him so much you just hated to let him down. He was, and is, all but worshiped by the men of E Company.
When you talk about combat leadership under fire on the beach at Normandy, Ellery concluded, I don’t see how the credit can go to anyone other than the company-grade officers and senior NCOs who led t...
They were returning to Mourmelon, but not to the barracks. This time they were billeted in large green twelve-man wall tents, about a mile outside what Webster called the pathetically shabby garrison...
The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled...
Sobel was Jewish, urban, with a commission from the National Guard. Hester had started as a private, then earned his commission from Officer Candidate’s School (OCS). Most
SHAEF had prepared for everything except the weather. It now became an obsession. It was the one thing for which no one could plan, and the one thing that no one could control. In the end, the most co...
Pvt. Felix Branham was in that boat. Colonel Canham had a BAR and a .45 and he was leading us in, Branham said. There he was firing and he got his BAR shot out of his hand and he reached and he used h...
On the beach, men saw Father Lacy go down to the water’s edge and pull the dead, dying, and wounded from the water and put them in relatively protected positions. He didn’t stop at that, but prayed fo...
Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the ter...
Adding to the problems of frustration and anger caused by the point system was the combination of too much liquor, too many pistols, and too many captured vehicles. Road accidents were almost as dange...
Failure at one point could throw the momentum out of balance and result in chaos. All in that room were aware
We sometimes forget, I think, that you can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition, but you can’t buy valor and you can’t pull heroes off an assembly line.