Religion gives a man enough courage to face the overwhelming, and there may have been so little religion at Restrepo because the men didn’t feel particularly overwhelmed. (Why appeal to God when you can call in Apaches?) You don’t haul your cook up there just so that he can be in his first firefight unless you’re pretty confident it’s going to end well. But even in the early days, when things were definitely not ending well, the nearly narcotic effect of a tightly knit group might have made faith superfluous. The platoon was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made
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