. 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.

2. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 43, 45, 46.)

The comradeship formed in training and reinforced in combat lasted a lifetime. Forty-nine years after Toccoa, Pvt. Don Malarkey of Oregon wrote of the summer of 1942, "So this was the beginning of the most momentous experience of my life, as a member of E Company. There is not a day that has passed since that I do not thank Adolf Hitler for allowing me to be associated with the most talented and inspiring group of men that I have ever known." Every member of Easy interviewed by this author for this book said something similar.