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December 24, 2023 - January 15, 2024
Christenson got so drunk he was “making out with the toilet,” a condition common to young men who have just been introduced to whiskey.
A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook Currahee put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.”
Most of what they learned in the training proved to be valuable in combat, but it was that intimacy, that total trust, that comradeship that developed on those long, cold, wet English nights that proved to be invaluable.
They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.
No matter how hard you train, nor however realistic the training, no one can ever be fully prepared for the intensity of the real thing.
Thus did 13,400 of America’s finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler’s Fortress Europe.
We had learned that heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important.”
But he was there, where he wanted to be, going into combat with his buddies in Easy Company.
thus completing the points of the compass. That is the way surrounded troops fight. That was the way the airborne had been trained to fight.
“Artillery is a terrible thing,” Webster said. “God, I hate it.”
That officers and men broke under the constant strain, tension, and vulnerability is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that so many did not break.
“They’ve got us surrounded—the poor bastards.”
psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare . . . .
Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.
They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers.
“And that was the end of the war.”
Almost every man in that room had killed. Their blood was up. Their anger was deep and cold. But what stands out in the incident is not the pistol whipping and beatings, but the restraint. They had had enough of killing.
A few of them became rich, a few became powerful, almost all of them built their houses and did their jobs and raised their families and lived good lives, taking full advantage of the freedom they had helped to preserve.
He has achieved exactly what he wanted in life, that peace and quiet he promised himself as he lay down to catch some sleep on the night of June 6–7, 1944, and the continuing love and respect of the men he commanded in Easy Company in World War II.
‘No,’ I answered, ‘but I served in a company of heroes.’ ”
