What is not replaceable is the esteem of comrades, but to the replacement soldier, just arrived, there is no comradeship, so there is nothing to hold him to his post. Gray tells the story of a deserter he found in a woods in France in November 1944. The lad was from the Pennsylvania mountains, he was accustomed to camping out, he had been there a couple weeks and intended to stay until the war ended. “All the men I knew and trained with have been killed or transferred,” the deserter explained. “I’m lonely. . . . The shells seem to come closer all the time and I can’t stand them.”
He begged Gray to leave him. Gray refused, said
4. Gray, The Warriors, 119.
5. Gray, The Warriors, 82.
he would have to turn him in, but promised he would not be punished. The soldier said he knew that; he bitterly predicted “they” would simply put him back into the line again—which was exactly what happened when Gray brought him in.6
At the front, not only spit-and-polish discipline breaks down. Orders can be ignored, as supervision is not exact where danger of death is present. “Old soldiers have learned by bitter experience to be independent and to make their own decisions,” Webster wrote his parents shortly after he was wounded. “Once our lieutenant told my squad leader to take his eight men and knock out some anti-aircraft guns that were firing on a flight of gliders. Nine men with rifles fighting dual-purpose 88s and 40 mms! The sergeant said yes (censored). By using his own judgment he saved our lives in a situation where a new man would have rushed in blindly. This same lieutenant later ordered two scouts into a (German position, but they, knowing better, got (censored).”
Veterans tried to help replacements, but they also took care I not to learn their names, as they expected them to be gone shortly. It was not that the old hands had no sympathy for the recruits. “Our new members,” Webster wrote his parents, “representatives of the 18-year-old draft, were so young and enthusiastic-looking it seemed a crime to send them into battle. We paratroopers get the best men in the army, but it’s a hell of a fate for somebody who’s never been away from home or high school to come here.”
No man in Easy had been in combat before June 6, 1944, but by October all the men who took off from England on the evening of June 5 who were still alive in Holland had been through two combat jumps and two campaigns. Many of them had been wounded; some of the wounded had gone AWOL from the hospital to go to Holland. This was not because they had a love of combat, but because they knew if they did not go to war with Easy, they would be sent to war with strangers, as the only way 1 out of combat.00091 16 T0.00(b)-2r005 Tc 0.00 tw07( had been in comt.ct ma50.0009 Tw -25.3005 -1.147005e1)-7(. co -hstrangTJETEwould -8(o2was 8(e of a fa04 Tw 24b153 T505 -1.1475 Td[c 0.0009 Tw -2 -1.15.rangers, as the005 0 Tdew07T wa Tc 0087 0 neweam)9xCpthr.a2r0 Twnly)-8( way)-8( 1 ou here.r;u4at n j/44[(fA5cguns aggvsl5cguns age)3-vb Tw epRcomt.4c 0doo Hoi47( wouldr8gTo )]M[005e1)-7(.u.6iOcto13 Tm[(Vy)-7(, thuospcomt.4c 07gaustedteam)w8 twpRcoms 4 TwwpR Tc 0.0003 Tw -27.2842 so towt -1.4c 0doojw3 Toeivese tongert-ew4c 0349005da, but)]T twrnrwhe0n). By)-uw07842 soskaBe 0.0003 Tw 10.98 0 0 100nac1 ou here.r;u4at n j/44[8e tonge 0.h4at n j/44hme of the wounded woul000iei as .98 72cpaigns. Many