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I became intensely curious about how this remarkable closeness had been developed. It is something that all armies everywhere throughout history strive to create but seldom do, and never better than with Easy. The only way to satisfy my curiosity was to research and write the company history.
In May 1990, Drez attended the company's reunion in Orlando, Florida, where he video-recorded eight hours of group interview. That same month I did three days of interviewing with Gordon in my office. In July, I went to Winters' farm in Pennsylvania, where I did four days of interviewing. On the fourth day, a half-dozen men from the company living on the East Coast drove to the farm for a group interview. Later in 1990 I spent a weekend at Carwood Lipton's home in Southern Pines, where Bill Guarnere joined us. I flew to Oregon to spend another weekend with Don Malarkey and a group of West Coast residents.
I interviewed a dozen other company members over the telephone and have had an extensive correspondence with nearly all living members of the company. At my urging ten of the men have written their wartime memoirs, ranging from ten to 200 pages. I have been given copies of wartime letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings.
In November 1990, Moira and I toured Easy's battle sites in Normandy and Belgium. I interviewed Frenchmen from the area the company fought over who had been living there at the time. In July 1991, we visited the scenes of Easy's battles throughout Europe with Winters, Lipton, and Malarkey. Winters, Moira, and I spent an afternoon with Baron Colonel Frederick von der Heydte at his home near Munich.
Mrs. Barbara Embree, widow of Pvt. David Webster, gave me copies of his letters to his parents and his book-length manuscript on his World War II memoirs. Webster was a keen observer and excellent writer. His contribution was invaluable.
Currahee!, the scrapbook written by Lt. James Morton and published by the 506th PIR in 1945, was also invaluable. Don Malarkey gave me a copy, most generous on his part as it is a rare book. Rendezvous with Destiny, the history of the 101st Airborne, written by Leonard Rapport and Arthur Northwood, provided the big picture plus facts, figures, details, atmosphere, and more. Other sources are noted in the text.
When I wrote Pegasus Bridge, I decided not to show the manuscript to Maj. John Howard, the C.O. of D Company, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, or any other of the thirty British gliderborne troops I had interviewed. I was working on a deadline that made it impossible to take up the months that would have been involved. The veterans had frequently contradicted each other on small points, and very occasionally on big ones. Not one of them would have accepted what I had written as entirely accurate, and I feared that, if they saw the manuscript, I'd be in for endless bickering over when this or that happened, or what happened, or why it happened.
I felt it was my task to make my best judgment on what was true, what had been misremembered, what had been exaggerated by the old soldiers telling their war stories, what acts of heroism had been played down by a man too modest to brag on himself.