The men had taken chances they would not take in the future. Lipton said he never would have climbed that tree and so exposed himself had he been a veteran. “But we were so full of fire that day.” “You don’t realize, your first time,” Guarnere said. “I’d never, never do again what I did that morning.” Compton would not have burst through that hedge had he been experienced. “I was sure I would not be killed,” Lipton said. “I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move.” (Paul Fussell, in Wartime, writes that the soldier going into combat the first time thinks
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