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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

You lead by fear or you lead by example.

“Artillery takes the joy out of life.”

A man’s inability to do anything about the artillery fire added to the widespread, overwhelming feeling of frustration.

Paul Fussell has described the two stages of rationalization a combat soldier goes through—it can’t happen to me, then it can happen to me, unless I’m more careful—followed by a stage of “accurate perception: it is going to happen to me, and only my not being there [on the front lines] is going to prevent it.”

The replacements, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds fresh from the States, were wide-eyed. Although the veterans were only a year or two older, they looked terrifying to the recruits.

“I firmly believe that only a combat soldier has the right to judge another combat soldier.

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

“I had come to take Roosevelt for granted,” Webster wrote his parents, “like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost.”

Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body—anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.

“Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions.”