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For those who had wanted and could afford them, there had been women in London, Paris, along the Ruhr, but, Webster observed, "in Austria, where the women were cleaner, fairer, better built, and more willing than in any other part of Europe, the G.I.s had their field day."
The flow of booze was never ending. On May 28, Webster wrote his parents, "Since leaving Berchtesgaden, we've had a bun on every night. Two days ago we hijacked a German Wehrmacht warehouse to the tune of a couple of cases of gin—forty-eight bottles all told. Your package with the orange juice powder, therefore, came in very handy."
Captain Speirs had only one standing order about the drinking—no drunkenness outside. This was strictly enforced by the sergeants, who wanted no incidents with drunken soldier boys on guard duty, or just wandering the streets and mountain paths. In their quarters, however, the men were free to drink all they could hold. Most of them drank more than that.
Webster's squad kept a pitcher of iced tea and gin full and handy. Each night, he wrote, "by eight o'clock Matthews was lisping and stuttering; Marsh was bragging about his squad and how they obeyed him; Sholty was sitting quietly on a bed, grinning; Winn was laughing and shouting and talking about Bastogne; McCreary was boasting of his courage ('There ain't nobody in this platoon braver than I am buddy') with immodesty but complete truth; Gilmore was pressing clothes furiously, a peculiar and most welcome manifestation of his high spirits,- Hale slobbered and poured himself another drink; Chris, who never got rowdy, sat back in cold silence; Rader had passed out in the armchair; and I, who had passed out gracefully and without a struggle, was sound asleep."
The lads would work off their hangovers with an afternoon swim or game of softball. Winters was a nondrinker, who neither approved nor disapproved of drinking; his two best friends, Welsh and Nixon, were heavy drinkers. He never berated anyone for getting drunk on his own time. Had he ever been tempted to do so, he got a reminder each afternoon of why these excesses were taking place. The boys would wear shorts and nothing else in the warm sun while they played softball. Nearly every one of them had at least one scar. Some men had two, three, or even four scars on their chest, back, arms or legs. "And keep in mind," he concluded, "that at Kaprun I was looking only at the men who were not seriously wounded."
There was another reminder of the price that E Company and the others had paid to get to where they were. On June 5, at 2200 hours, the men celebrated the first anniversary of their jump into Normandy. Webster was struck by the contrast. A year earlier, at 2200 hours, "My heart was beating like Gene Krupa's drum and my stomach was tied up and very empty. . . . Now I am sitting in a cosy house in the Austrian Alps. I have a tall glass of iced tea and gin in one hand, my pen in the other. A lot of boys who took off from that Devonshire airport are dead, buried in lovely cemeteries in Ste. Mere-Eglise, Son, and in Belgium, but I'm still here and very thankful for it and tonight we shall remember them in a way they would have thought most fitting— by having a wild, noisy party."