Chapter 1

I am the only surviving member of 1st
Battalion, 518th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st
Airborne Division, Army of the United States. 
My unit was decimated in the Ardennes forest during the winter of 1944-1945, by enemies both human and otherwise.

This account has been a long time coming.  I don’t really know how to explain that.  Part of it is the nature of the beast; my generation is particularly reluctant to dwell on what we’ve done… or especially how we felt about doing it.  We had a job to do and we did it.  Over and done with.  Maybe it’s
just the way we were brought up.  Maybe it’s just me.  It’s dangerous for one man to speak for a generation.

Part of my delay has to do with the nature of what happened in those snow-covered woods all those years ago.  War is surreal by nature; it’s hard enough to try to describe what it was like to begin with, much less talk about the things we found and saw and fought in Dom Caern without sounding insane or senile or both.  Maybe you won’t believe me.  Hell, there’s already guys who say the Holocaust never happened, and I saw that, too.           

Part of it is the nightmares, in which dark shapes huddling just out of sight in the mists murmur warbling commands in a language no human has ever spoken.  I don’t understand the words, per se, but the meaning is clear: keep your mouth shut.

I guess the reason I’m writing this at all is my fading memory.  My memory has become my blessing and my curse.  It’s getting so that I can’t always remember what it is I did today or the day before, or even what I was in the middle of doing.  Those days, though, those days I can remember almost photographically; every day from when I signed up for the Army all the way through jump school and the drops on Normandy and Holland and then the Bulge and all the rest, until we ended the war up at The Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain refuge in Austria.

Remembering those days at Dom Caern is a curse.  It will be a blessing when this Alzheimer’s or whatever it is that’s eating my memories getsaround to lunching on January 1945.  For those of you that
don’t know history, it was the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge… the biggest battle ever fought by the US Army.  It involved over a million men stretched along a front hundreds of miles long.  Hitler made a last gasp offensive for Antwerp with an army that was already considered defeated.  It was a doomed, damn fool gamble and a lot of men got killed for it; but then, old Adolf had a knack for getting people killed, didn’t he?  Sometimes it’s dangerous for one man to speak for a country.

After we held off at Bastogne, the 101st was immediately ordered to assist in pushing the Germans back… there would be no rest for the Airborne.  In early January, we were holed up in the woods near a tiny village to the west of Noville.  I never did find out its name. It was frigid cold and dirty and terrifying, mostly terrifying because we were waiting for a German counterattack.  They
always counterattacked.

The war got truly terrifying after the
attack came.

It started with an artillery barrage.