Paul Fussell has described the two stages of rationalization a combat soldier goes through — it can’t happen to me, then it can happen to me, unless … - Stephen E. Ambrose

On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist.II The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone.

At one point Churchill growled that “the destinies of two great empires . . . seem to be tied up in some Goddamned things called LSTs.

and riding at full gallop across the unfenced Great Plains of North America, day after day, was a source of never