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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鈥攚hich 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 for a rifleman in ETO was death or a wound serious enough to cost a limb. If they had to fight, they were determined it would be with their comrades.
6. Gray, The Warriors, 17-18.
Replacements could seldom reach this level of identification. Further, as the army was speeding up the training process to provide men for the battle, the replacements were not of the quality of the original Currahee men. At Veghal, Webster saw a replacement named Max "moaning and clutching his right hand."
"Help me! Help me! Somebody help me!"
"What's wrong? Shot anywhere else?"
"No, no. It hurts!"
"Why don't you get up and run?"
"He didn't feel like it. He was in shock so bad he just wanted to lie there and moan. . . . It's a funny thing about shock. Some boys can have their foot blown off and come limping back to the aid station under their own power, while others, like Max, freeze up at the sight of blood and refuse to help themselves. They say that shock is largely physical, but it seems to me that one's mental attitude has a lot to do with it. Max wasn't aggressive, he wasn't hard, he wasn't well-trained."