Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

by Stephen E. Ambrose

“We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.”

Men are true comrades only when each is ready to give up his life for the other, without reflection and without thought of personal loss.”2

He was openly friendly, genuinely interested in us and our physical training. He was almost shy—he wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if he stepped in it.” Gordon said that if a man called out, “Hey, Lieutenant, you got a date tonight?” Winters would turn beet red.

Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.”

You lead by fear or you lead by example.

“Not a man fell out,” he told the press, “but when they fell, they fell face forward.”

‘Currahee,’ and its meaning: ‘Standing Alone.’ We Stand Alone Together.”

no war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”

there is no punishment the Army can inflict on a front-line soldier worse than putting him into the front line.

the human eye is lustful; it craves the novel, the unusual, the spectacular.

The soldier’s concern is with death, not life, with destruction, not construction. The ultimate destruction is killing another human being.

As always on the front line, there was no past or future, only the present, made tense by the ever-present threat that violent death could come at any instant. “Life has become strictly a day to day and hour to hour affair,” Webster wrote his parents.

“rather than ride to the front in trucks, for there is an element of chance in an airborne mission—it may be rough; it may be easy; perhaps there will be no enemy at all—which appeals to me more than a prosaic infantry attack against an enemy who knows where you are and when you’re coming.”