All these activities were accompanied by shouting in unison, chanting, singing together, or bitching. The language was foul. These nineteen- and twenty-year-old enlisted men, free from the restraints of home and culture, thrown together into an all-male society, coming from all over America, used words as one form of bonding. The one most commonly used, by far, was the f-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: “those fuckers,” or “fucking cooks”; what they did: “fucked it up again”; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the “vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language.” The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it.
The men were learning to do more than swear, more than how to fire a rifle, more than that the limits of their physical endurance were much greater than they had ever imagined. They were learning instant, unquestioning obedience.
Minor infractions were punished on the spot, usually by requiring the man to do twenty push-ups. More serious infractions cost a man his weekend pass, or several hours marching in full field pack on the parade ground. The Army had
a saying, Gordon related: “We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.” Brought together by their misery, held together by their cadence counts, singing, and common experiences, they were becoming a family.
The company learned to act as a unit. Within days of the formation of Easy, the 140 men could make a one-quarter or one-half turn, or an about-face, as if one. Or set off at double-time, or on a full run. Or drop to the ground to do push-ups. Or shout “Yes, Sir!” or “No, Sir!” in unison.
All this was part of the initiation rites common to all armies. So was learning to drink. Beer, almost exclusively, at the post PX, there being no nearby towns. Lots of beer. They sang soldiers’ songs. Toward the end of the evening, invariably someone would insult someone else with a slurring reference to his mother, his sweetheart, his home town, or his region. Then they would fight, as soldier boys do, inflicting bloody noses and blackened eyes, before staggering back to their barracks, yelling war chants, supporting each other, becoming comrades.
The result of these shared experiences was a closeness unknown to all outsiders. Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers. Their trust in, and knowledge of, each other is total.
They got to know each other’s life stories, what they did before they came into the Army, where and why they volunteered, what they liked to eat and drink, what their capabilities were. On a night march they would hear a cough and know who it was; on a night maneuver they would see someone sneaking through the woods and know who it was from his silhouette.
Their identification worked downward, from the Army to the Airborne to the 506th to 2nd Battalion to Easy Company to platoon to squad. Pvt. Kurt Gabel of the 513th PIR described his experience in words that any member of E
Company could have used: “The three of us, Jake, Joe, and I, became … an entity. There were many entities in our close-knit organizations. Groups of threes and fours, usually from the same squads or sections, core elements within the families that were the small units, were readily recognized as entities. . . . This sharing . . . evolved never to be relinquished, never to be repeated. Often three such entities would make up a squad, with incredible results in combat. They would literally insist on going hungry for one another, freezing for one another, dying for one another. And the squad would try to protect them or bail them out without the slightest regard to consequences, cussing them all the way for making it necessary. Such a rifle squad, machine gun section, scout-observer section, pathfinder section was a mystical concoction.”(1) Philosopher J. Glen Gray, in his classic work The Warriors, got it exactly right: “Organization for a common and concrete goal in peacetime organizations does not evoke anything like the degree of comradeship commonly known in war. … At its height, this sense of comradeship is an ecstasy. . . . 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) (1. Kurt Gabel, The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II. (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 142.