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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Pvt. Ed Tipper said of his first day in Easy, “I looked up at nearby Mount Currahee and told someone, ‘I’ll bet that when we finish the training program here, the last thing they’ll make us do will be to climb to the top of that mountain.’ [Currahee was more a hill than a mountain, but it rose 1,000 feet above the parade ground and dominated the landscape.] A few minutes later, someone blew a whistle. We fell in, were ordered to change to boots and athletic trunks, did so, fell in again—and then ran most of the three miles to the top and back down again.” They lost some men that first day. Within a week, they were running—or at least double-timing—all the way up and back. At the end of the second week, Tipper went on, “We were told, ‘Relax. No runs today.’ We were taken to the mess hall for a tremendous meal of spaghetti at lunchtime. When we came out of the mess hall, a whistle blew, and we were told, ‘The orders are changed. We run.’ We went to the top of Currahee and back with a couple of ambulances following, and men vomiting spaghetti everywhere along the way. Those who dropped out and accepted the medics’ invitation to ride back in the ambulances found themselves shipped out that same day.”